Beyond All Limits
by Suburban Slasher
Summary: The unkindest cuts are always delivered with the weapon of a friend. Rife with spoilers, foul language, sexual references, a near rape, and violence. GojyoxHakkai, and the occasional hint at SanzoxGoku. Not for kiddies.
1. Making a Break

"Beyond All Limits"

by Princess of Pain

Part I: Making a Break

_NOTES: By way of spoilers, this chapter contains vague references to Volume 7 of the manga, as well as to Hakkai's past and the Rikudo saga._

"Hey, Hakkai...?" Goku's eyes were perfectly round, as they tended to be when he was clueless. It was as if he tried to soften the blow of how silly his question might be by making himself as cute as possible.

"Mm?" Hakkai looked up from his book. One of his eyes had disappeared behind the shield of his monocle. The other, a green that made Goku think of ripe melons, provided only a mild stare. You could never tell what Hakkai was thinking when you looked in his eyes--he wasn't like Sanzo or Gojyo, both of whom Goku found easy to understand. With them, almost everything was up-front and in your face. Hakkai kept all of that under lock and chain.

"When's Gojyo going to get back?"

A near-imperceptible shift of his oddly delicate shoulders. "Whenever Gojyo chooses."

"But why'd he have to be so stupid and storm off in the first place? All I did was pull on his hair, and it's not like a huge clump came out--"

"You broke the cardinal rule of mock-combat. No hair-pulling, especially if you actually pull the hair out."

"Sanzo, is that true?"

For a moment, Goku didn't think that the monk would respond. His head was buried in the local paper, and he normally didn't respond well to reality until he reached the Classifieds. Then, after a brief rustle of paper: "I wouldn't know. I never play when I fight."

Goku blinked. As with most things Sanzo said--things that did not contain the words "Bakasaru", "NO", or "Shut up or I'll kill you"--it unsettled him. And as he did with most things that unsettled him, he promptly forgot about it. "D'you think I should apologize, Hakkai? I think I can buy him some new hair... "

Light, staccato laughter. "Now, now, don't worry about our friend Gojyo. I suspect he's suffering from a mild case of cabin fever. He'll come back when he gets tired, or hungry."

"Or in a pine box," Sanzo said. The voice behind the newspaper sounded slightly hopeful.

"Then how come," Goku said slowly, as though he was trying to verbally solve a complex math problem, "we only got a room with three beds?"

"If he's gonna pitch a hissy, he can pay for his own damned room," the voice behind the paper snarled.

Hakkai laughed.

"So... what if he doesn't come back?" Goku asked.

If Sanzo had something to say to that, he did not share it. The laughter quickly slid off Hakkai's face, though, like rain rolling off a sheet of glass. Goku fidgeted under the almost-stern gaze that the youkai fixed him with; he hated making the others get too upset, or too serious. "Not again, Goku."

"But what if he _doesn't_?"

"What if your head exploded?" Sanzo grumbled.

"He has hardly been provoked enough to leave again," Hakkai said. His seriousness was drifting away just as quickly as his laughter, being replaced by his usual placid expression. "After all, he left his cigarettes in Jeepu, and he spent all his money in the last town. He can't leave his addiction behind, if nothing else."

"Well, yeah. But maybe I should apologize anyhow. He was being a stupid kappa, but I _did_ pull out a lot of hair... do you think I should apologize?"

"Perhaps that would smooth things over more quickly," Hakkai said, noncommittal.

"Oi, Sanzo?"

"If you're asking for permission to leave, get the hell out. Maybe then I'll get two seconds' peace."

Goku (after making absolutely certain that Sanzo was not peeking over the edge of the newspaper) stuck his tongue out at the monk, pulling down on one of his eyelids for good measure. With a "Thanks, Hakkai!", he bounded out the door. If he could just find Gojyo, things might work out for the best, in the end.

-----

In spite of Goku's wonderings, Hakkai did not begin to seriously worry about either of them until several hours later. Sanzo and he passed the time amiably enough--reading, for the most part, in silence. Given their interesting companions, and their interesting quest, it was almost impossible for monk and youkai to find the time to sit and delve into their respective reading choices. Hakkai accepted the opportunity gratefully. After all, nothing too horrible could possibly happen to Gojyo and Goku--nothing that, put together, would not wind up with its ass thoroughly punished.

Concern sank into his heart as the sun sank into the west. It had been at least three hours since Goku had so eagerly ran off. Surely, it would not take that long for him to find Gojyo, apologize, and come back... unless, of course, they had both been thoroughly stopped. Visions of impossibly strong bands of youkai, not to mention more rebel gods, danced in his head. Even if Goku wasn't killable, he was certainly woundable. And Gojyo was a lot more susceptible to death than he liked to let on.

As the sunlight filtering in through the hotel room's windows caught fire and turned a burnt orange-yellow, his concern mutated into flat-out worry. Not only was something being wrong with Goku and Gojyo becoming more of a possibility, he had no idea of how to suggest to Sanzo that they needed to be looked for, in such a way that Sanzo would actually accept.

He tried, as always, for diplomacy (being the subtle art of letting someone else have your way, of course). "Goku has certainly been gone for a while."

"Mmm."

"Perhaps something has not gone according to his plans."

"Who cares?"

"We're his friends, aren't we?"

"If he dies, it's his own stupid fault."

"I care about them."

"That's your mistake, not mine."

This was not going particularly well. "I suppose it is," he said, his usual smile firmly in place. "Still, though, I worry about their livelihood. And perhaps the Sanbutsushin worry as well."

"Pardon me?" That got his attention.

"You know... Kanzeon Bosatsu did come down to save you, during that business with Rikudo. I suppose she'll be willing to make another visit, if Goku and Gojyo are in too much trouble."

Sanzo glared at him over the edge of the newspaper. "I hope not. That creepy bitch."

He laughed. "Do you think she'll suck out your blood, if Gojyo or Goku needed it?"

The monk visibly shuddered. "I guess checking up on them might not be a bad idea."

"I think it's a wonderful one," he said, his smile widening. "But then, you're not our fearless leader for no reason at all, are you?"

"Are you making fun of me?"

"Would I do that to you?"

Sanzo put down his rather-crinkled newspaper. With a sigh, he pulled off his spectacles. "Yes. Although I get the feeling that I wouldn't know if you did."

Hakkai emitted more of his canned laughter as he stood. "Maybe you're right. Where do you think we should begin to look for them?"

"I guess--."

Hakkai was halfway to the door, before he realized that Sanzo was not following him. Sanzo also wasn't saying anything; his sentence had been neatly amputated. The youkai looked over his shoulder, to ensure that there was nothing wrong.

What he saw was Sanzo staring out the window. Sanzo had frozen halfway between sitting and standing--both hands still resting on the table at which he'd sat, his butt still hovering a bit above the chair. The burnt-orange light of the sunset caught in his pale hair and skin, making them glow with an almost unnatural beauty that would make anyone's heart ache. Eyes the color of a cloud swollen with thunder and rain were wide; his mouth was hanging quite open. He was squinting, his head cocked ever so slightly in a classic expression of confusion. What he was thinking could not have been more clear if someone had written _What the fuck is that? _on his forehead.

"... Sanzo?"

"Hakkai," he said, his voice sounding almost strained. "I want you to come over here, right now, look out this window, and tell me what you see."

Feeling rather confused himself, Hakkai moved to stand next to Sanzo, and trained his gaze out the window. The sunset's light was beautiful, bringing out all the green of the trees surrounding the village's central street. The street itself was crowded with the after-work, before-dinner shoppers, who appeared to be splitting and making room for someone in their midst. Hakkai couldn't help but focus on that; it was odd, all of those people shifting and making room for someone...

Suddenly, he realized who that someone was. In an unintended parody of Sanzo, his mouth dropped open.

"... is... is that Gojyo?"

"Yeah." Sanzo lit a cigarette. "I was hoping I was wrong. Guess not."

"... is he _naked_?"

"Yeah."

"What..." For the first time in a long time, Hakkai found himself truly at a loss for words.

"Beats all fuck out of me. Maybe he's snapped."

"But where's Goku?"

"Not with Gojyo, apparently."

Hakkai quietly prayed for patience. "Well, shall we go see what's going on with him?"

"Sure, why not. If he gets arrested, I don't want to have to pay his bail."

-----

He liked this. The sun felt good on his naked skin, except for the parts where the blood was getting sticky and thick. Ugh. That wasn't so good. So he sat down and tried to scrape some of it off, but then, it only got dirt in it. Fuck it. Didn't matter. Besides, the sun was so lovely. He wanted to walk into it, but he decided that it would be a shorter walk over to that food stand. Oh, an apple never sounded so good before! He stood and quietly ate, savoring every bite. He thought he heard a noise in the background, something that kind of sounded like someone telling him to pay, but he didn't listen. Who cared? He thought about not eating the seeds or the stem, but decided it would be too much trouble. They hurt his stomach, and that was bad, but the sun was still so nice, and the air felt so good rubbing against every bared inch of his body. People passing, he didn't see their faces. They didn't matter. It was all a soft rumble in the background of his mind. All was well.

"Gojyo?"

That noise got through; why? He turned, his body swaying awkwardly, as if he was not used to using it. Oh. The noise came from a person he knew. Hakkai. He remembered this person very well. They had been friends for years now. He loved Hakkai. Hakkai was his friend. Not like the little shitsucking saru from before, and thank the powers that be that he wouldn't have to deal with HIM anymore. His stomach itched. He ran his nails over it. "What?"

"Ah... Gojyo, are you feeling okay?"

"Fine. Great. Awesome. Never been better." Why wouldn't he be? The sun was nice and warm, and the blood was caked on thickly enough so that it felt like a second skin stretched over his own, no longer sticky. And now Hakkai was here, his friend, whom he loved. Everything was marvelous.

"Where the fuck is Goku, you retarded kappa?"

And nothing was fine. Nothing was good. There. The stupid fucking monk. The wicked smart-mouthed evil hypocritical heartless useless monk. Flowers died wherever he went; his voice struck anger in his heart. The monk never had a good word for him or for anyone. He hated him. He decided that he wanted to kill him.

-----

Hakkai wondered whether or not the weight of his sins had finally driven him mad. Seeing Gojyo naked wasn't a shock (it's hard to live with someone for three years without walking in on them in the bath at least once); the context of his nudity certainly did. There he stood, right in the middle of the street, thick bloodsplatters inkblotting over his stomach and his legs and matting into the dark curls nestled around his--Hakkai turned a little red. He honestly had no idea how he was supposed to respond to this situation, so he tried to simply ask Gojyo how he felt--and then Sanzo opened his mouth, and everything quickly went straight to Hell.

The look that the hanyo bestowed upon Sanzo chilled Hakkai's marrow. He'd seen Gojyo angry before, dangerously so... but never anything resembling this naked, unbound fury. There was hate there, and murder. In that instant, he realized that Gojyo looked like Gonou, and he knew a creeping, horrid fear.

"I killed him," the redhead said. Despite the anger in his eyes, his voice sounded like it was discussing nothing more important than the weather.

"I know I didn't hear that right," Sanzo snapped. "Speak up, jackass."

"I. KILLED. HIM." Gojyo tilted his head, as an animal expressing curiosity at some new noise. "He was loud and rudish. Didn't like it. Didn't like HIM. Hated him, so crude. So I sliced him up until he died. I think that I'll kill you."

A smirk cut into Sanzo's face. He opened his mouth, probably to observe that Gojyo could not successfully shave without cutting himself, much less properly handle his shakujou, and that Goku would not die even if he were killed. At the same moment, his hand dropped down to grip the butt of his pistol.

This was as far as he'd gotten when Gojyo fell upon him.

It was incredible, really--even Hakkai did not precisely see the hanyo moving. It was almost an exercise in teleportation. Gojyo simply appeared before them, the moon-shaped blade of his shakujou spinning and looping crazily through the air, the chain grinding and whirling behind it. His sunset eyes blazed with violence and cruelty. He looked as though he planned on taking a shit in Sanzo's chest cavity, once he messily cut out an appropriate hole.

"S--" And his chi-barrier was up and in place, the shakujou's blade bouncing off the humming shield of light. Hakkai glanced over at Sanzo. The monk had not so much as flinched. He'd drawn his weapon, but kept it aimed towards the ground, his index finger laying flush against the barrel instead of tucked against the trigger. His smirk had given way to a glare of cold contempt.

Gojyo kicked the barrier. It was a wild, childish kick, like a teenager who is angry with his parents slamming his bedroom door. "Stupid--fucking--" The ire he fixed on Sanzo would have made a redwood wither. "You motherfucking hypocritical bastard! You waste of space! You spout all of that shit about living for yourself because you're afraid that if you called it selfishness, everyone would realize what a hole you are!"

"Is stupid catching, Hakkai?" Sanzo said. To the youkai's amazement, Sanzo seemed more amused than angered at Gojyo's words.

"I would think that you would have been infected long ago, were it contagious," he said.

"I--what does he think he's doing now?"

Hakkai looked to Gojyo, then realized that the hanyo was no longer there. In the last ten seconds, he had apparently wandered away. Accordingly, the chi-barrier disappeared, and the youkai gave the crowd that had gathered an embarrassed smile. "We're terribly sorry for the trouble," he said to them; to Sanzo, "Where do you think Goku is?"

Sanzo did not respond until he had lit himself a cigarette. "Not dead, certainly. Probably he's wherever Gojyo was when his brain got scrambled. Where did he go after he pitched his fit and stomped off?"

"Ah, the woods."

"How do you know?"

"I watched where he went from the window." He felt strangely exposed under Sanzo's gaze. "I was worried about him. In case something happened, I wanted an idea of where he had gone."

The monk shrugged. "So who gets to wrangle the crazy, and who gets to go tromping through the woodlands?"

Hakkai could have pointed out that Sanzo was a much better wrangler than he. The image of Sanzo shooting a naked Gojyo until he ran out of bullets, then standing on his corpse and screaming out his victory to the gods and everyone, kept him silent on that accord. "I'll try my hand at calming him down. Since Goku might be... hurt, you should take some bandages with you."

"Fucking forests," Sanzo griped. "You watch. More of Winnie-the-Pooh's rabid brethren are going to eat the stupid saru before I even get to him."

Hakkai smiled. "I admire the courage and fortitude with which you face your troubles, Sanzo."

_-end-_


	2. Ever So Slowly, Thumping Away

"Beyond All Limits"

by Princess of Pain

Part II: Ever So Slowly, Thumping Away

_SPOILERS: Vague references to Sanzo and Goku's pasts._

The monk was gone! The hateful hypocritical lying violent bastard monk was flying far and away, out of his thoughts forever. There were more important things to think about. Aw, yeah. Like the girl. He was in love with her. Her hair shone mahogany in the sunlight, which he also loved, and her eyes were the color of a cigarette ember. He had seen full-sized melons smaller than her breasts. Want vibrated through his body and gathered in an exclamation between his legs. He saw her and decided that all he wanted in this world was to find out how tight her legs would grip around his waist when he was balls-deep in her. She didn't understand. She kept crying and running, but he knew that she was only confused, she would soon understand, he would worship her more than any other man she had ever known. Then he stopped running, because a hand had grabbed his shoulder. Someone trying to stop him. No, he would not have that.

---

"Gojyo--" Hakkai started, then found himself dodging the shakujou once more. Dismay was overcasting his confusion. Noting that Gojyo was now... obviously physically aroused did not help his nerves in the slightest.

Hakkai permitted the loops of flying chain to envelope his arm, using his other arm to catch the blade before it could remove important aspects of his head. The attack was clumsy, especially for Gojyo. He gave the chain a hard yank, and pulled the staff straight out of the hanyo's grip.

"That's mine!" the redhead whined. "You can't take it away!"

"I'll give it back," Hakkai said, his voice more measured than it had ever been in his life, "when you calm down and listen to me."

"But it's _mine_ and I want it!" He sounded five years old.

"Gojyo, you're not feeling very well." He deftly unwove the chain wrapped around his arm, then let the shakujou fall to the earth. A dull clacking noise rose up, as the chain pulled itself home.

"Of course I'm myself! I've never _been_ more myself, I'm let go!" His eyes were storms of blood. Hakkai saw that the hanyo's body was shaking, and that his feet kept shifting in the dust, like a child nearly paralyzed with indecision. "You're stuck. You wouldn't understand. No one does. I just wanted to fuck her, what's the big oh Christ I'm hungry! Hey, look! They have dumplings!"

Gojyo casually grabbed Hakkai by the hand and dragged him in the direction of the food stand--naked, bloody, and laughing all the way. Shakujou, Sanzo, Goku, the girl... all was forgiven, or forgotten. Hakkai had seen Gojyo have mood swings before, but only a madman could switch gears so harshly. Though he was loathe to do so, his mind turned over every possible, unpleasant cause for his friend's behavior. This made smiling that much harder.

He decided to try reason once more--there had to be a way to reach Gojyo, somehow... "You know, I've been known to make good dumplings."

For the moment, the hanyo ceased to wrench Hakkai's arm out of its socket. The look of hunger he bestowed upon Hakkai was disturbing in its intensity. "Yeah?!"

"Let's go back to the hotel room. I can cook you whatever you like when we get there." He spoke with the slow, tempting diction of a parent who needs to bribe a child into being quiet. "Fried rice?"

Gojyo's eyes were huge. "Yes."

"Maybe some of the almond chicken you--"

"NOW."

And the converted youkai permitted himself to be dragged off once more, nodding and apologizing to everyone who was giving them shocked and disgusted glares, and behaving, all in all, like worry and dismay were not both crushing his thoughts into so much confusion.

-----

Of all the places for Goku to disappear, it had to be a fucking mother-raping _forest_.

Sanzo had been looking for some scrap or sign of Goku for at least two hours. He wasn't quite sure how long it had been, because the sun had gone down some time ago, and he knew the moon was a rather unreliable way to keep time. Not to mention an unreliable light source: it was barely thicker than a thumbnail in the sky. He'd have more light if the gods had put an ignited matchstick in the sky. Not that much sunlight would get through the foliage, anyhow. This forest was thicker than Goku's skull. Smelled a bit like the saru's feet, too.

Even at night, the humidity was murder: most of the moisture that normally would have evaporated was simply trapped under the canopy. It might have been a cool night everywhere else in Shangri-La, but Sanzo was sweating hard enough to warrant peeling down his robes to the black undershirt and arm-warmers, and tucking his sutra into his belt. He couldn't imagine how nasty it would be in the full heat of the day, although it might have explained why the idiot kappa was running around mother-naked.

Other than, of course, the fact that Gojyo was an idiot.

Sanzo had a damned good idea of what had happened. He didn't like it, in spite of himself, but more than that, he knew that Hakkai wouldn't like it. He might actually have to go against his nature and employ some manner of tact when he broached the subject... oh, fuck it. Hakkai was a grown-up who had learned how to handle the shit life threw at him. He'd understand. And if he didn't, it didn't matter.

"Bakasaru!" he bellowed, as he'd been doing for the past hour or so. "Quit scratching your ass and get out here! You've got ten seconds before I start firing into the trees at random!"

He might have continued like that--stomping about and screaming until the sheer fury of his words caused the trees to catch fire--had a certain scent not drifted past his nose. He'd become intimate with that scent, through the years and the miles. It bore a horrible familiarity.

Blood. And lots of it.

The monk corrected his course, heading towards the stench. He did not notice that his footsteps were now silent--no more the angry, trampling stomps. He did not notice that he'd drawn his pistol, the black rubber grip chafing his hand, or that the barrel of the gun mimicked his eyes and looked everywhere they did. These were commands from the lizard brain, the instinct worn deep in Sanzo's character, like the paths of rivers worn into the planet. They were no longer things that required his attention.

That smell, on the other hand, did.

Sanzo had begun to wonder if he'd passed the source of the odor, when one of his sandals stuck fast in the earth. He looked down as he kicked up a bit to free it, resisting the urge to swear (subconsciously knowing that if the smell wasn't Goku's blood, or if Gojyo had not spilled it, then whatever did must still be near enough to hear him). A thin beam of moonlight illuminated the ground before him, making the clots of dirt and smears of liquid on his sandal and robes shine a blackish red. It smelled like a copper hammer was pounding into his olfactory nerves.

He glanced up, and there was Goku. Mostly. The not-quite-youkai was the epicenter of gore. Fans and dribbles of blood reflected heart's-blood red in the moonlight. The saru's clothes were a mangled maroon. Goku had been laid open on the forest floor, like a hog being slaughtered. Most of the slices and stabs appeared to be located in his torso. A grotesque, thick loop of intestines had spilled out from its moors onto Goku's lap, and there were several wounds too wide to be considered slashes or stabs. He looked like he had been gored by a minotaur.

His chest was quickly rising and falling, as if by attaining more oxygen, he could heal himself. Good. That was the important part: Goku was still breathing.

Still walking as silently as the knife of an assassin, Sanzo moved to Goku's side, kneeling in the earth beside him. Tacky blood juiced up under his weight and soaked into the knees of his robes and his jeans, which he disregarded. He found the bandages he'd brought with him at Hakkai's behest. They were pitifully unable to bind all of Goku's wounds, but they would probably keep his insides from becoming his outsides for the next few minutes. Thank the gods, he was unconscious. He'd heard somewhere that intestines--or whatever it was that held them in place--had a lot of nerves, and it hurt like a bastard to fuck with them too much.

Sanzo moved with the coolness of a battlefield surgeon. He gripped the grisly loop of guts and simply shoved them back inside of Goku, then lifted the saru up. He leaned Goku's body against his own, using himself as a bracer to hold the idiot monkey up as he quickly wrapped what bandages he had around Goku's wounds. He could feel Goku's tortured breathing, and hear a high whistling noise in his breath--he sounded like an old billows with a few holes in it. Something flipped in his stomach at the thought.

Gojyo was the least capable of the monk's companions, in that monk's not-particularly-humble opinion. While not totally useless, Goku could out-brawl the perverted kappa in his sleep (and had, on more than one occasion). It was true that Goku might have held back if he'd been attacked by a friend, but even so, he'd never let himself get shoved this close to Death.

A horribly weak, whining noise rang in his ears. Sanzo looked down, his hands knotting the bandages automatically. Apparently, the knot was tight enough to wake Goku up. Sanzo's eyes met dull golden orbs that looked without seeing very much. They looked like two tarnished coins.

"... s..." Whatever the saru had expected to see upon waking, Sanzo was apparently not it.

"Save your breath. I don't have time for your stupidity, and you need to keep quiet and work on recovering." The fucking humidity. He was sweating overtime; he could feel droplets rolling down his cheeks and collecting in the hallows behind his ears and in his temples. He gave Goku a good, hard poke in the belly to make sure that his guts weren't going to be sliding out onto his shoes anytime soon, and got a rather shrill shriek from his patient in response. He hunkered down low and picked Goku up like a baby, cradling him against his chest.

Goku's dull eyes were fuzzed over with confusion. "... san..."

"I said shut up. If I leave you here to rot, Hakkai might actually kill me. But if you ever do something so stupid as to get the shit beaten out of you this badly again, I'm not playing doctor, you got it?" He started to jog as fast as he could, given his burden. Goku did not weigh very much, considering that he ate enough for five sumo wrestlers, but it was enough to throw him off.

Goku's face crumbled, like a sheet of paper exposed to a fire. For a moment, Sanzo tried to puzzle out why what he'd said disturbed the monkey so much--then, he spoke again: "... why does... gojyo... hate me...?"

"Didn't I tell you to stop talking?"

"... but _why_..."

"I don't know, Goku. No one knows. Happy? Now shut up."

He did not look down at Goku again, but he could hear the quiet snuffles of the saru beginning to cry. He would have been shocked, but then, Goku had done things like this before. Most of his being was invested in how much his friends loved him and whether or not they would ever leave him. Poor kid must feel like the gods had, one by one, come down from Heaven in order to spit in his face. Again.

Sanzo furtively looked around as he darted betwixt the trees. No. No one was around. In fact, no animals were around. He hadn't seen so much as a squirrel since he'd gotten here. No one would see.

He shifted Goku slightly in his arms, in order to free up one of his hands. He rested this hand on the crown of Goku's skull. The saru's hair was thick and coarse and kinky, like animal fur. He ignored this, and lightly petted it, silently soothing his horribly injured friend. Sanzo would never verbally admit it, but this was something that Koumyo Sanzo had done, when he was little and frightened and bright with hate, to comfort him and make him feel worthwhile. A gesture of love, understanding, and connection which he had never shared with anyone but Goku. Not that that meant anything in the slightest.

He could feel Goku relaxing under his touches, slipping into sleep (or, more likely, mild shock). Good. Then he might not remember, and make the mistake of telling anyone the awful truth, about how Sanzo happened to have a heart.

-----

Hakkai had decided to make Sanzo's life difficult, by purchasing another hotel room. At least, that was one of the two reasons why Hakkai and Gojyo weren't in their room when he returned with Goku. The other being that Gojyo had succeeded in killing one of them at last, and was now running mad through the township. At least it would no longer be his problem.

He decided to check for them anyhow, and after tucking Goku into one of their beds, he headed down to the front desk. His undershirt and arm-warmers were both thick and tacky with blood, and the clean bone of his robes was forever stained with the stuff, but fuck it. He wasn't trying to win a beauty contest.

The manager behind the counter seemed less than impressed with the monk. "There's a doctor three doors down. I don't know first aid."

"Shove it. I'm looking for a couple of guys who're staying here. A brown-haired dude with a monocle and a naked redhead with a stupid grin. Sound familiar, or am I gonna have to start kicking down doors?"

The manager looked at him as if Sanzo were a speck of dogshit on a freshly-cleaned carpet. One of his eyebrows was ever so slightly cocked upwards. "The brown-haired gentleman and his nude companion checked in two hours ago."

"You let a crazy, naked fuck into your hotel? Are you mental?"

"Sir, I have owned this hotel for fifteen years. I have seen much weirder things than a naked man."

Sanzo sincerely hoped that he would never be so down on his luck as to work in one of these places. "And where are they?"

"Room 85, right down that hall. Could you please move along?" The manager made a shooing gesture. "You smell like a foot locker. You're starting to drive off customers."

Sanzo's hand dropped to his gun. No, there wasn't time to do all the things he was going to do to this holier-than-thou, shitfucking bastard. "I'm coming back for you later, you bitch."

"Don't talk too rough. It gets me so hard I can't think straight. Now get out."

Sanzo could neither think, speak, nor see clearly. He stammered something which he hoped was grand and scathing before stomping off in the direction that the manager had indicated, all the while engaging in fantasies involving a vice, the manager's head, and several red-hot pokers.

_-end-_

Next section: "Puttsun". In which Sanzo and Hakkai compare notes on their respective patients, and Gojyo finds what he considers to be a good replacement for the girl he pursued in the beginning of this section.


	3. Puttsun

"Beyond All Limits"

by Princess of Pain

Part III: Puttsun

_NOTES: "Puttsun" is Japanese onomatopoeia for "the sound of a string snapping". In slang, the word is used to describe someone who has 'snapped', or lost their mind; such a phrase is transliterated as "His last string snapped". Spoilers for this section include references to Goku's past._

"Hakkai!" Sanzo's tense fist hammered on the door with "85" painted over its Judas-hole, producing a noise like muted gunfire. "No more games, open u--"

The door opened. Sanzo was mid-knock, and was thrown slightly off-balance at his fist not reaching its target. A pale hand shot out from the crack in the doorway, gripping onto his. It felt like it was made of bands of steel.

"Stop... knocking." Hakkai had his usual unruffled appearance. There was something that seemed off about him--something about the expression hidden deep in his eyes--which Sanzo could only attribute to being locked in a room with a madman for a few hours. The youkai gripped Sanzo's hand even harder, like a man falling off a cliff who grips onto an outcropping of rock. "He's finally asleep. Please don't wake him up."

The monk had to grab Hakkai's wrist and pull in order to get the converted youkai to release him. Damn, did he have a grip. "Asleep?"

Hakkai stepped out of the hotel room, quickly shutting the door behind him--but not before casting one final paranoid glance into the room, to verify what he was telling Sanzo. "Yes, asleep."

"How the hell did you manage that? Did you chi-blast him into oblivion?"

His smile was tight. "No. I cooked for him."

"Oh, so you drugged him. I see."

"No, tempting though it was. He ate until he vomited. Then he kept eating until he did it again. He's had at least one laughing fit, and has tried to jump out the window four times. He hasn't made an attempt on my life in the past thirty minutes, though. I convinced him that he wanted to lie down and let me read to him, until he finally drifted off."

"Maybe he and Goku switched places," Sanzo said dryly.

"Did you find him?" Hakkai distractedly scanned over Sanzo, probably noting the bloodstains on his robes. And, in true Hakkai fashion, not saying a word about it until he got an answer.

"Yeah. He looked like a voodoo doll. I patched him up a little, but he needs to get all of his wounds sealed, and that's gonna take your magic touch."

Hakkai's face fell. Even his smile drifted away, like a cloud being pushed out of the sky by a hot wind. "Oh, God. Gojyo is the culprit, then."

"Looks that way. Listen, I'll sit at the door and make sure Gojyo doesn't get up to too much monkey business while you're gone. Doesn't seem like me being in the same room with him would be a good idea, since the fucker clearly has forgotten his place. I'll take care of Goku when you're done; just make sure he doesn't lose any more blood than he already has, all right?"

The youkai nodded, then ran both hands through his hair. Given how much Hakkai's hair tended to spike on a normal basis, it didn't affect its appearance much, but the fact that Hakkai was actually expressing the stress he was under in any small fashion... Sanzo felt mildly stunned. "Yes. I'll be back as soon as I can. Thanks very much, Sanzo."

"Shut up and hurry back. These floorboards are murder on my ass," he griped as he sat down.

"I would hate for you to be uncomfortable," the brunette said over his shoulder, as he jogged down the hall towards the other hotel room.

As he lit a well-earned cigarette, Sanzo once again wondered whether or not Hakkai was back-handedly making fun of him.

-----

Light. The first thing he saw when he woke up. Through his eyelids. A veiled red blur of light through the mist of capillaries and skin. His heart leaped up a little. It felt overwhelmed with a nostalgia, a want--too big to define, too vague to name. The way he felt whenever his diadem was not wrapped firmly around his skull: the creeping approach of memories marching ever closer to the foreground of his mind, like a marauding army approaching a castle.

He eagerly opened his eyes, seeking the completion of the collage of memories that swam up in his brain, and was met with disappointment once again. The light was not golden, like the sun. It was as green as a grape. It also seemed to be working with the maddening itch that was wrapping up his torso in what felt like a coat of insects, and he hated it until he realized that there was someone standing behind the light--and that it was someone he knew.

"Hakkai!" Goku smiled, in spite of the near-torment that his friend was putting him through. He looked down at his stomach, and saw the green light working into the wounds, the skin pulling itself back together and sealing off. It made him feel more than a little urpy. "Where's..."

"Sanzo is playing zookeeper for the moment," Hakkai said, his grin as bright as always. His eyes were curved up along with his smile. "Once your wounds are done closing, I'll be taking his place, and Sanzo will be here to care for you."

"... right. So what's really going to happen?"

Hakkai laughed. The light first dimmed, then faded altogether. Goku could still see bright balls and spots of rainbow light in his vision, making the other youkai look like he stood in a psychedelic haze. "Gojyo is not exactly fond of Sanzo at the moment. It would be unwise for either of them to be in close proximity; I'm not sure who would kill whom first."

Gojyo. His heart felt like a plate that had just been emptied of food. "He hates me."

The other man's eyes were bright and serious. "No."

"Yeah. Look at me." Goku did not have to look to know that most of his clothes were shredded, and that the tatters that remained were stiff with his own blood. He also did not have to try very hard to remember how the blades of the shakujou had felt when they were hooking into him, or the expression that had been in Gojyo's eyes--like looking into the windows of an empty house.

"Gojyo is not himself, he--" Hakkai suddenly paused. He was thinking of something, Goku could see that, and he could see that whatever the thought was, it was a bad one. The other youkai actually paled, and his eyes darkened to the color of dried nori. His mouth mutated from an easy smile to a single hard line. "He is not in control of himself. Something is not... there. Don't worry about it. We'll work on helping him, but in the meantime, you need to regain your strength."

Goku hated that. The others never told him anything; they forgot that he was their teammate, not their kid brother or their son or their disciple. Treating him like he was stupid. He was just as smart as all of them, maybe smarter than Gojyo, but he never got a chance, and it wasn't his fault that he, more often than not, got proved wrong when he contradicted them all. But Hakkai would not believe him if he said so, so he laid back, let it pass. "Tell... tell Sanzo that I'm sorry he keeps saving me."

The smile returned. "He knows."

Goku shut his eyes, and in the darkness, began to seek the light once more.

-----

Hakkai shut the door behind him, then turned the door-handle's inset knob, locking it. He felt a bit like a psychiatrist who was sealing himself in his patient's room in the sanitarium. He even had a guard: Sanzo was already arranging to move Goku to a nearby, unoccupied room, so that the monk could keep an ear out for Hakkai, should he be needed, and an eye out for Goku. Safely within shouting distance.

Things had already collapsed significantly, when he had to think of Gojyo this way. Like a wild animal--utterly unpredictable.

For instance, the hanyo was actually awake when Hakkai reentered their hotel room, but made no attempt (as he had many times earlier) to escape his prison. He was sitting on the bed, still perfectly naked, still tattooed with blood. He had three lit cigarettes in his mouth; the smoke was pluming up and making it hard to discern whether or not the top two-thirds of his head still existed. He held a fourth in his hands, since he was running out of room in his mouth, and was meticulously trying to light it. It was a challenge, Hakkai imagined, to try and see through the smog the hanyo's smokes were producing.

Hakuryu was tied up on Gojyo's lap, like a pork roast. The tiny dragon's maw was muzzled firmly shut. He looked up at Hakkai with a panicked expression--one that the youkai could read easily enough (as any owner could read the emotions of their pets): "What is he doing to me, and why haven't you stopped him yet?"

"Gojyo," he said, the tone of his voice that of a parent addressing a wayward child. He didn't know if he wanted to attempt to rescue Hakuryu or make Gojyo stop his imitation of a chimney. Finally, he decided that the latter might be easier, if he could work it correctly. "One cigarette should be more than enough."

He thought that Gojyo was looking in his direction. The cigarettes bobbed, anyhow. "I want to smoke."

"I can tell that. People will think that there's a fire if that smell gets out of the room, though, and then they'll take all of your cigarettes away."

The hand attempting to flick the Zippo to life froze. "They can't."

"They would."

"I hate people. I want them all to die."

"Yes, Genjo. Shall I get you an ashtray, so you can stub out all those extras?"

"No. I want to smoke."

"Did you want to tie up Hakuryu?"

"Noooo..." Gojyo dropped his lighter and his fourth cigarette, and began to obsessively pet the dragon, running both his hands from the crown of his skull to the tip of his tail. Hakuryu's eyes actually got wider, and he attempted to sink in-between the hanyo's legs and onto the floor. This made Gojyo look like a Bond villain conceived while Ian Fleming was on an acid trip. "What I wanted was just to pet it. It's so damn cute. But it wouldn't let me pet it, so I tied it up what good."

"Why don't you let Hakuryu go?" His voice was persuasion summed up in sound. "I think he'd rather be with Sanzo."

"_What_?" He stopped mid-pet. His eyes were huge and fiery, with the sheer wrath that invoking the monk's name managed to produce.

"Oh, haven't you noticed? Hakuryu very much prefers Sanzo over almost any of us. He--"

"TRAITOR!" Gojyo jerked up and away from the dragon, permitting him to reach his goal of the floor. Hakkai moved forward, picking the poor thing up and cradling it close, trying to pretend like feeling its soft-leather scales shivering under his touch didn't leave him more than a little angry at the hanyo.

Hakkai's hands deftly worked at undoing the various and ridiculously-numbered knots looped around his dragon's body. "I'll be putting him in the other hotel room with Sanzo and Goku, so that you won't have to be near him anymore."

Gojyo nodded fiercely. The cloud of smoke that masked much of his head thickened and bobbed.

Once Hakuryu was free, Hakkai quickly let him out of the hotel room, whispering to him where Sanzo and Goku's room was located, and leaving the dragon to find his way on his own. He could fly just fine, which meant that Gojyo had not damaged the poor thing's wings, or anything else, so it seemed. As for the cigarettes... well,h e was becoming used to making Gojyo want to do things. He locked the door firmly behind himself once more, then observed: "That blood looks rather sticky."

Gojyo looked down at himself. His head divided the thick spool of smoke into two tendrils. "Yeah, don't like it."

"How about if I wipe you down? I'll get a washcloth, the softest one I can find, and wet it in warm water. That'll get all that crud right off. How does that sound to you?"

The mouth containing too many cigarettes grinned. One of the cigarettes dropped out onto the floor. "Okay." Gojyo spat the others onto the floor, then stared at them as they burned small holes into the hardwood floor, as if hypnotized.

Moving quickly as ever, Hakkai stomped out all of the cancer-sticks, picked them up, and deposited them in the wastebasket in the bathroom. He returned a minute later, with the promised washcloth. In that minute, Gojyo had climbed up on top of the vanity. He appeared to have done this so that he could better watch himself as he performed a rather spastic dance, and sang as though he had not a care in the world.

"Gojyo!" Hakkai clapped his hands together sharply. The noise was muffled by the wet "thop!" of the washcloth.

The hanyo stopped mid-wiggle, looking over at Hakkai with an exaggerated expression of surprise. He clearly thought that Hakkai had no business distracting him from his song-and-dance routine. "WHAT?!"

"Clean! Remember?" He held up the rag, like a flag of surrender.

The oversimplification worked. The hanyo hopped easily off the vanity and made his wandering way to the bed, onto which he heavily flopped. He seemed to fall asleep almost instantly. This was fine with Hakkai. It would make his job somewhat easier.

He sat down on the bed beside Gojyo, and began to clean him as promised, though he tactfully ignored any of the bloody areas too close to anything too... personal of Gojyo's. Worry was wearing deep lines into his brow, as well as a host of other demons: dismay, confusion, resignation. His appearance had smoothed itself out considerably since he'd first seen Sanzo, but he still felt disheveled and out of place.

Gojyo was his closest friend who still walked the earth. Hakkai loved him dearly and frankly, for everything that Gojyo had done for him warranted blind adulation, if not dedicated love. And because no one had ever loved Gojyo properly before, and he felt a deep sense of luck that he got to be the first.

They had been living together from the moment they met, and they had been traveling together on this quest for so long, and Gojyo had remained--through everything--the same good friend, who could be counted on for whatever was needed. Both Sanzo and Goku were his friends, but in subtle, different ways. Goku was like the child he'd always wanted; Sanzo was an intellectual ally.

The difference in the end, he supposed, was that Goku needed Sanzo, and Sanzo needed no one. Gojyo, on the other hand, needed Hakkai--in ways that the youkai sometimes didn't understand.

Now, Gojyo needed him more than ever, and there was absolutely nothing that Hakkai could think to do that would save his friend. It made him more than a little angry at himself, and fueled his despair over what could possibly be--

-----

He had closed his eyes because it felt good to lie down. The bed was soft and cradling under his body. He felt tired. Killing Goku and running and all had taken its toll, and he felt like he could sleep. Then something wonderfully warm and wet had started scrubbing all the nasty blood off his skin, which felt more marvelous than the sun, than the food, than the girl. He peeked. Hakkai. Hakkai was such a good friend. He cleaned him up and kept him in food and cigarettes. He had kept their cabin in good upright condition. Hakkai always took good care of him. He loved him so much. Hakkai was beautiful. He had these soulful green eyes that made his heart flip if he looked into them for too long, and a really great ass and hips that swayed just right. He was built more beautifully than any woman. He decided that he wanted to love him. Hard.

-----

Hakkai's thoughts were amputated as the world spun round him. Of all the emotions he'd been feeling, confusion had misted over them all--now, it rose up to the fore. One second, he was sitting on the bed, washing off Gojyo's legs, and the next, he was lying on the bed, and something heavy was--

Not something. Gojyo.

The hanyo was pressed up tightly against him, so much so that he could feel a mixture of warm water and blood soaking into his clothing. Gojyo had one arm riding against Hakkai's throat; the other hand was clapped firmly against his forehead, holding him in place. Their legs were a tangle; his arms were pinned underneath their combined weight. Hakkai could feel every jagged breath Gojyo took, as well as the steel hard-on that was now encapsulated between their bodies.

Black wings of panic spread in his heart. He immediately tried to break Gojyo's grasp, but that was like trying to stop a falling boulder by holding up one's hands: between the four unofficial members of the Sanzo-ikko, Gojyo was the one with the most effective pinning techniques. If he pushed up at all, Gojyo's forearm introduced itself to his trachea, and his arms were twisted too firmly behind himself to be of any use. His throat felt like it was on fire; his limbs were already numbing, drained of blood.

Gojyo, grinning like a maniac, leaned down and ran his tongue over Hakkai's lips.

The hand clamping on his forehead turned him loose, in order to reach down and give his overshirt a sharp yank. The four slender clasps holding it closed tore like threads; with a few harder pulls, the shirt itself started to give way with a loud ripping noise, exposing more of Hakkai's throat and the undershirt which he was now profoundly grateful to be wearing. The youkai had never felt so naked before in his entire life. His bare skin was crawling with horrid anticipation.

"I love you so fucking much," Gojyo said. His voice was like a hail of broken glass on concrete.

Hakkai lost his mind in a wave of fright. He opened his mouth to scream; Gojyo's free hand clamped down over his mouth and jaw. He bucked wildly against Gojyo's body, ignoring the fact that with each motion, his throat was more and more in danger of being crushed, that the air he managed to gasp into his lungs was thinner and thinner; he felt like he was breathing through stone. His monocle slipped off his nose from the effort and disappeared into the pillows. He barely noticed. He was more concerned with the hanyo placing sloppy licks and rather painful bites on his neck, like a drunken vampire, then attempting to rip off his undershirt with his teeth. Hakkai, all helplessness and panic, screamed against Gojyo's hand, and got a taste of leather and copper in his mouth for his pains.

"You ffffffffucking tease," his attacker growled. "You can't look as good as you and not know it. You know but you think you're too fucking good for me. I know you."

The hand clamped over his mouth disappeared. Hakkai attempted to scream once again, and found himself shrieking against Gojyo's lips. The kiss was grinding, like running into an iron wall, full of teeth and tongue, Gojyo tasting like twenty years of cigarette tar. Hakkai felt the rest of his undershirt give, tearing into a jacket, leaving his chest and stomach revealed. The hanyo uttered a grating, throaty moan at the sight of him. His scar felt like it was on fire. Gojyo took a moment to give his nipples a brutal twist, before pushing his hand down between them, fumbling with the fly of Hakkai's pants.

Oh, nightmare. This wasn't happening, Gojyo was not fucking his mouth with his tongue, and he wasn't pulling his pants just low enough for what he wanted, and Hakkai wasn't not able to fight back, and this whole day was a hallucination, and Gojyo was certainly not jerking his--

"OI, PRICK-LICK!"

Attacker and victim both stupidly looked over to the doorway, from whence the voice had come. There stood Sanzo. He had completely shed his bloody robes, and stood before them in sandals, jeans, and his under-shirt and arm-warmers. Hakkai had no idea if Sanzo's expression would be best defined as horror, disgust, fury, or some unholy mating of all three. Above him, Gojyo was completely still, utterly intent.

Sanzo took a drag on the cigarette that naturally dangled from his lips. He cocked his head slightly askance, his chin tilted upwards in his typical expression of holier-than-thou pride. "Let me tell you something, Gojyo. I went out with your mom last night, and I carried her home like a six-pack."

"DEAD." The hanyo was out of the bed in a flash, erection wilting, the very picture of hatred. His shakujou manifested in his hands.

"She gives head like an opium whore."

Gojyo's response was an incoherent verbal expression of godly anger and hatred. He threw himself at Sanzo, who wisely skipped back--as was his habit in battle--and took off down the hall, screaming out insults that even a soldier would never consider saying.

Hakkai laid back in the bed, mostly naked, totally violated. He felt mutilated and raped. He didn't know how Sanzo knew what was going on--he couldn't imagine that he'd made enough noise for the monk to hear them--and he didn't know how he could express to Sanzo his gratitude, for being the only person who could have stopped Gojyo from himself. His thoughts kept circling about what he'd been thinking about just before Gojyo had rolled him onto the bed, and about how that had in the last five minutes become a lie, and that they might never be friends again: either he would hate Gojyo for what had happened, or Gojyo would hate himself.

Whatever was responsible for this... Hakkai knew that he was going to visit every ounce of his wrath upon it, if only because of what it had just made his friend do to him.

Hakkai permitted himself to lie motionless for a few more seconds, before pulling up his pants and abandoning his shredded shirts.

_-end-_

Next section: "Sanzo's Razor". In which Hakkai and Sanzo discuss Medieval philosophy, and Sanzo gives Gojyo 48 hours to live.

As an aside, I'd like to note that the scene between Gojyo and Hakkai was not meant to be sexy or titillating. If you found it to be so, that's your business, but I consider rape and near-rape to be serious, not sexy. Please do not praise how "hot" you thought it was in your reviews; I'm not interested in that kind of support.


	4. Sanzo's Razor

"Beyond All Limits"

by Princess of Pain

Part IV: Sanzo's Razor

_SPOILERS: This section references the events of episodes 20 and 21, with the scorpion-youkai. It also references Hakkai's past._

Hakkai could hear Sanzo coming before the monk even turned the handle of the door. Wooden sandals on hardwood floors makes for loud footsteps, and Sanzo had never precisely been light on his feet, when he wasn't dodging an attack. He heard the door open and close, and the monk's clacking footsteps moving across the hotel room, and the creaking of the bed under Sanzo's weight as he sat down.

"Wore him out," he said, lighting a cigarette. "Finally managed to trick him around a corner. Had to lasso him and hog-tie him up, but he's back in the other hotel room. What is that, tea?"

Hakkai looked down at the stove. Both his hands were gripping onto its edge. His knuckles were white. The small tea-pot he'd set on one of the glowing coils on the range was making a low bubbly noise--the prelude to a whistle. The air coming from its spout smelled like hot grease. "Sake, actually. I didn't have any other way to heat it. Would you like a cup?"

"I'd like forty cups, actually. Goddamn kappa had me running across Hell and half of India."

The converted youkai thought he managed to smile, even though Sanzo wasn't watching. The hotel room had actually come with the tea-pot, and a few cups; it was slightly more high-end than most of the outhouses that they had stayed in. Surprising, really. The tourist trade didn't seem to be booming in this town, so why bother with such niceties?

He set two cups down on the kitchen counter, still not looking back at Sanzo. He could almost feel Sanzo's gaze switching between himself busying about in the kitchen and the lightly-snoring monkey in one of the beds. He picked up the tea-pot from the burner and, keeping a finger on the lid to prevent it from flying off, began to pour into one of the cups.

His hands were shaking so hard that the lid rattled against his finger. The spout of the tea-pot kept spastically tapping against the inside of the cup, making the sake swirl up and about as it poured. The noise it made sounded like Goku slamming his utensils against a table, though it was not accompanied by Goku's loud vocalizations about what food he wanted. Sanzo could surely hear that, he had to know what he was thinking about.

_"I love you so fucking much..."_

Hakkai forced himself to put down the tea-pot. Otherwise, he might have dropped it. He took a deep breath. He had been through rough patches of Hell before. Unspeakable things had happened to him, and he had survived. He could get through this. He commanded his hands to stop betraying him, and picked up the pot once more, and poured.

_"... you think you're too fucking good for me..."_

His hands were empty. Sanzo had taken it from him, and lightly shoved him aside, and he had been too caught up in the memory of a dagger voice, a thrusting tongue, and raping hands to even notice.

The monk silently finished filling the first cup, and immediately passed it to Hakkai. He took it automatically, swallowing it like medicine. They both stood at the kitchen counter, drinking the entire pot of sake in no time at all, and though it did absolutely nothing towards getting Hakkai drunk, he felt better afterwards. Something familiar that he could latch onto and call real--a marker out of this nightmare.

"We need to talk," Sanzo finally said when the sake was done with. He walked over to the tiny card table and sat down, and pulled the thick glass ashtray closer to himself. "Siddown."

"Yes." He sat. What was he going to do? Go back to the other hotel room, where Gojyo lay screaming in the darkness? Oh, no. Sitting was just fine with him.

He looked to Sanzo, as all of them seemed to do when things were too out of control. The monk's pale face bore a slight alcoholic blush, and beads of sweat were drying on his forehead. His hair was a brambly mess of blonde. He studied Hakkai as if the youkai were a pane of glass: looking directly through him.

The false priest spoke first. "How're you feeling?"

He had no idea if Sanzo actually cared, or if the blonde was merely killing time, for some strange Sanzo-esque reason. How was he feeling? His throat was still raw. The skin of his neck was covered with bite-marks. When he'd put on his sleeping-shirt (now the only shirt he owned that wasn't in tatters), he'd seen that his nipples were swelling and already turning a hot, angry red. He supposed that he'd have some terrific bruises for some time. And whenever he wasn't carefully thinking of nothing, he was feeling Gojyo weigh him down, feeling his limbs go numb from lack of blood, the weird mix of Goku's lifesblood and water soaking against his skin, the taste of ash and copper in his mouth.

"I am fine," he said, feeling like a parrot that does not understand what it repeats to its human masters. "But, Sanzo... what are we going to do about him?"

The ember of the monk's cigarette flared with an intake of smoke. Two small dots of flame briefly danced in his violet eyes. "I think we should kill him."

"S-sanzo!" It appeared that in spite of everything, he was still capable of being shocked. He knew, and had always known, that this man who was almost worshipped by Buddhists everywhere could be both coldhearted and selfish... but this was simply going too far.

"Don't start with me, Hakkai. I know you're not stupid. Don't make me question my judgment about you."

"How could you suggest something like that?!"

"Because he might try to kill us again." The cigarette's light bobbed as he spoke, playing strange tricks with the shadows on his face. "He already has. Three times, now. And even if he doesn't, he might do something worse, which you now know from personal experience."

Hakkai's face flushed--from dismay, and not just a little anger. "It isn't his fault. He's not in control of what's happening to him. Or... what he's doing." He had to believe that, at this point. He had to know that Gojyo would never try to do what he'd done. His sanity hinged on that belief. "Killing him solves nothing."

"I doubt that all the mad youkai we've killed were responsible for their actions," Sanzo said. "That's never made you hesitate before."

"That's a completely different situation!"

"How do you know?" Sanzo stubbed out his cigarette and promptly lit another, as though he were incapable of speech if his words were not clouded with smoke. "Don't tell me that you haven't thought about it."

"... yes. I have."

"The minus wave has caught up to him."

And there it was--the thought he'd had, when he'd told Goku that Gojyo was not himself (because hadn't they said so many times that the youkai were losing themselves to the wave?). The one he'd suppressed, because it was unthinkable. Yet it had not just been thought--it had been said, where the words couldn't be got back and undone. It was all the more frightening because it was probably true. Gojyo had never been considered an actual risk to the minus wave in Hakkai's mind. The human blood in him was his youryoku limiter, protecting his mind from his genetics, the DNA codes that were, in so many youkai, unraveling their personalities.

Perhaps the minus wave had a culminating affect. Had it slowly overwhelmed him? Had he been acting out of place? Had he been hiding anything from his teammates? Had Gojyo been going silently insane?

Hakkai could not name all of the emotions that swept through his soul, like a dry desert wind.

"It's not just probable," Sanzo said, immediately deciphering Hakkai's thoughts before they were expressed. "It's almost definite. I can't think of another explanation."

"Neither can I, which does not mean that one doesn't exist."

"Do you know what Occam's razor is?"

"No. I don't believe I do."

"The one thing Westerners have got right." Sanzo's eyes were forest fires. "Literally, it says that you shouldn't make more assumptions about a problem than you have to in order to solve it. The simplest explanation is the correct one."

Hakkai could see where Sanzo would fall in love with such an idea.

"Gojyo might not be affected by the wave. There could be hundreds of reasons why he's gone fuckshit crazy. But the simplest and most likely of them all is that his mind has given in. It was a risk we all knew about when we headed out on this quest. If he's lost himself, it's because he's weak." Contempt poisoned his voice. "And if it got him, the kindest thing to do would be to kill him before he can hurt anyone else."

Goku snored slightly louder, then murmured something about General Tso under his slurred breath.

"No." The word was a bullet.

"No?" The monk's glare would have turned Mount Kaka into so much lava. "Don't shit me, Hakkai. When the wave gets to you, I'll put a bullet in your head. Same with Goku. Same with anyone else. Explain to me why Gojyo's so goddamn special."

"Gojyo," he said, his voice as calm as autumn leaves stirred by a soft wind, "protected and cared for me when no one else would have. Probably when no one else _should_ have. At the very least, I owe him my life, and I will not let you take his away so easily, if I can save it." This felt wrong. Inter-party battles were not his ideal, and all he wanted was to be driving Jeepu away from this hateful village, with a sane Gojyo and a healed Goku, and a grumpy Sanzo who was not seriously considering killing Gojyo. Not this. Never this. All the same, so much depended on Gojyo being salvageable... "If you try to execute Gojyo... I'll have to defend him."

Sanzo's anger was never silent. The closest it got was at its birth, when he would quietly threaten the lives of whoever had provoked his fury. Typically, that stage lasted all of six seconds, at which point he would explode with the force of a supernova. And explode he did. "Are you deranged? You don't owe anyone anything! Those things happened when you were someone else! And need I remind you that we're talking about the man who made mincemeat out of Goku? Who tried to gut me like a fish on multiple occasions? Do I actually have to point out that an hour ago, he was trying to _rape _you?"

Goku shifted uncomfortably in his sleep, and made a rather pathetic-sounding snort. Sanzo plowed on, apparently not caring whether or not the teen would awaken. "Would you have let him fuck you out of your, your petty altruism? If he honestly tried to kill you, would you kill him to defend yourself? Or would you let him do something he'd never normally do so that he can be guilt-ridden and miserable for the rest of his shitty afterlife?"

"I don't know." He honestly did not. The worst of it was that, as per usual, Sanzo was almost entirely right. "But I apply what you might call... Sanzo's handle on Occam's razor."

"Do you want to die?"

That was a good sign. Sanzo only resorted to death threats when he was bored, or running out of comebacks. Hakkai plowed on: "The simplest explanation is correct, as well as the simplest solution. If you have a problem, shoot it until it goes away. Unless that problem is Goku."

"What the fuck did you just say to me?"

"When Goku went berserk in the desert, the simplest solution was to shoot him. You chose to spare his life. Tell me why."

Sanzo's features twisted into shock and hate. He had the look of a man who has just discovered the theft of a prized possession--something which he treated so shabbily that he assumed no one else would ever want it. "There is no guarantee that the bullets would work."

"And you wouldn't know because you've never tried. Why is that?"

Hakkai, in the silence before Sanzo spoke, became aware of a strange noise. It sounded high and squeaky, like sheets of plastic rubbing against each other. It took him a few seconds to realize that it was the sound of the monk grinding his teeth.

"You... bastard." Sanzo stubbed out his smoke, and did not light another. The air about his head was redolent with tobacco ghosts. He was no longer looking Hakkai in the eye, electing instead to stare out the window at the night. "I should have known better. Beating you in logic is like beating you at cards. Fucking impossible."

Hakkai's face developed an approximation of a smile. "So I've been told."

"My mind hasn't changed." The monk's voice was reproachful, as a proper priest rebuking a sinner. "If he tries to kill me again, his ass is grass. And you aren't gonna stop me."

"Come, Sanzo. We can find a happy medium, can't we?" His voice was light. It did not betray the fact that Gojyo's life was beginning to flash before his eyes.

"What."

"Give me two days."

"For what."

"I don't know. Maybe for nothing. Maybe I'll find a more true reason for Gojyo's madness. In any case, it'll take Goku about that long to recover. His wounds are fine, but he's still rather anemic. It won't be as though we'll be wasting time better spent heading West." He paused. He couldn't believe that he was about to suggest this idea. So much would be at stake if Sanzo agreed to it. But, at the least, he now knew that if he and Gojyo never spoke again, it would not be because of hatred: in spite of a cavalcade of nightmarish memories, he still loved the hanyo, and needed to work everything out, if he possibly could. "If I can't find any proof that the wave isn't affecting him after two sunsets... I won't stop you."

Sanzo turned slightly in his chair, now looking Hakkai in the eyes again. Violet slammed into verdant with the force of a sledgehammer to the skull. "You actually want to save that waste of flesh. After what he did to you."

"... yes."

"Fine. Whatever. Fuck off, I'm tired." He did look rather beaten--running through the woods, carrying Goku, dodging Gojyo and drinking half a pot of sake was taking its toll on the monk.

Hakkai did not have to fake his smile. "Thank you very--"

A loud rapping noise: someone knocking at the door.

The two men gazed at each other rather stupidly, not being able to figure out who would answer the door. Sanzo made an ambivalent grunt, and got up to answer it.

A voice, both pompous and male: "I didn't know how kinky priests could get, houshi-sama."

"Hakkai, where's my fucking gun?!" Sanzo darted back into the hotel room and flew for his pistol.

The converted youkai raised an eyebrow at the gentleman at the door--the manager of the hotel. "Can we help you? You might want to make it fast."

"Yes, you can," the manager said. "I am a very forgiving soul, and I do not care what deviant behavior people engage in behind closed doors, sir. But if you're going to tie up your boyfriend and leave him alone in a locked room, you might want to gag him. He's keeping the other guests awake." He gave Sanzo--who was rifling through his robes and sutra in search of his pistol--a rather amused and disdainful glare. "The Buddha frowns on inflicting pain on others, especially pain that they don't beg for."

"Death. Death to you. Now." Sanzo stood, the gun in his hand. His grin was borderline psychotic.

"We will! Please go, he's serious!" Hakkai said, his voice tainted with panic, and the manager managed to dodge out of the doorway before Sanzo emptied a rain of shells in his general direction.

_-end-_

NOTES: Hee. The manager returneth.

Next section: "Agave". In which Hakkai once again fails to get drunk, and Gojyo decides that it's finally time to get dressed.


	5. Agave

"Beyond All Limits"

by Princess of Pain

Part V: Agave

_SPOILERS: References to Goku's past._

It had been a slow day for Zhi. It was Sunday, the holy day for the Virgin worshippers who dominated the town. The Virgin apparently found time in her busy day to warn against imbibing alcohol on Her holy day, so the only people occupying Zhi's bar were the three or so tourists who'd bothered to come to this backwater. Really, he only opened up on days like this because he had nothing else to do. Not since Xeimei had left him with nothing but a stupid note and a pair of her dirty underwear.

So the bar was almost entirely empty, which suited him fine. He got to repair the damage incurred by Saturday night's hoopla, and inwardly grin with the knowledge that most of the guys who'd ripped up his place were now suffering huge hangovers in the pews. He could treat the scuffs in the leather pads on the seats, hammer chairs back together, and sweep up unobtrusive piles of broken glass unmolested. He even inwardly groaned when the door creaked open, indicating a new arrival. Not another idiot tourist... he really wanted to get this done...

He gave the new customer a look-over. Guy, young, brown hair fluffed up in the humidity, Midori-green eyes, slender build, one of those weird one-eyed glasses things balanced on his nose.

The customer, instead of decently sitting at one of the tables, walked straight up to the bar and sat on one of the stools that didn't need repair. Damn. Zhi moved accordingly, abandoning his broom and stepping back behind the bar. "Yeah."

"I would like a bottle of your hardest, finest liquor."

"Let me see your money."

The guy glanced down as he dug in his pockets. Some odd, thick rings gleamed in his left ear, momentarily illuminated by the light of a nearby lantern. A pale, almost delicate hand clicked a gizmo he hadn't seen in five years down on the oaken bar. "Will this do?"

"Wh... what is that, a credit card? That thing got good credit on it?"

"The best."

The guy's smile was sincere enough for Zhi, who tucked the card away. "What're your typical tastes?"

"Oh... sake, mostly."

"You should try agave."

His customer raised an eyebrow. Zhi, who had memorized his bar over the past fifteen years, did not have to watch his hands as they grabbed up two bottles of clear liquor.

"It looks like ordinary vodka."

"It ain't. Vodka's made from potatoes. Agave's made from some plant."

Intense green eyes studied the twin bottles. 'I've never heard of it."

"Only grows on the islands to the south. They say that they only grow good on the banks of this one river, because the whatdoyoucallit, the, uh, the _kami_ who lives there. Yeah, he's gone senile. So the water has no memory, and the plants drink the water and have no memory. And the agave kills memory." Zhi was not the brightest of men, but he knew plenty about booze. "Three shots and you're out."

The stranger brightly smiled. "Promising. What of the taste?"

"Two tastes, mainly. This one," he said, holding up one bottle, "tastes like eating a piece of chocolate and then licking an ashtray."

"Ashtray." Something dark flickered in the stranger's eyes--like a bat momentarily re-settling its wings in an infinitely dark cave. "I don't think so."

"This one," and he held up the other, "tastes like rotten wood."

"Perfect."

-----

When Goku woke up that morning, Sanzo was busily smoking, reading, and steaming. In other words, he was in his natural state of being.

The moronic kappa had been re-tied yesterday, not to mention gagged, in order to more adequately protect everyone's sanity. (And to shut that sheep-fucking manager up. Sanzo had many beautiful plans of how he was going to torture that jackass to death.) The monk had to loosen the gag in order to feed him: Hakkai did not go back into room 85, and privately, Sanzo wasn't sure that he could blame him for that. Not that he didn't publicly berate Hakkai for his cowardice anyhow.

This wasn't the way he wanted things to go. He wanted to be riding out of here in Jeepu, with a version of Hakkai who did not look at everything with painful, glassy eyes. Even with the kappa and the saru fighting like children in the backseat. Now that he thought about it, he had not heard any of the usual things which used to darken his days since this business had started: Gojyo (with an obsessiveness that borderlined on the disturbing) making crude references to penises, Goku complaining of hunger, Hakkai quietly laughing at all of them. He wouldn't go so far as to say that he missed these things--hell, no--but their absence was rather vocal, as it were.

He realized the saru was awake when Goku flipped over in the bedsheets, tangling himself up like a fly in a spider's web, and suddenly grumbled: "... naaaaa... sooooo... hungry..."

That was a good sign. Sanzo wouldn't say that he was glad to hear Goku say that, but he was a touch relieved.

"... is it time for breakfast?"

"It's time for lunch, idiot monkey. It's three in the afternoon."

"oh." Goku idly kicked the sheets off himself. He looked down at himself, and blinked when he saw that he was wearing his loose, shapeless pajamas. "did i do that?"

A small tic was beginning to develop under Sanzo's eye. "No. I did. Hakkai was off on his stupid quest for nonexistent clues. And your clothes were starting to smell."

Goku stared at him for a few seconds, then smiled that idiot grin that always made Sanzo feel a little off-balance. His fingers itched to wield his paper fan. "If you weren't an invalid, I'd slap you silly. Bakasaru."

Slowly, Goku stopped grinning. The expression drained off his face, like water spinning down a drain. It was interesting to watch. "Sanzo?"

Great. Now that the monkey was wide awake, there was no point in even trying to pretend to finish the funnies. Sanzo angrily folded his paper up (if one could imbue anger into such a mundane activity), and gave his bedridden friend a wrathful glare. "What?"

"Why do you want to kill Gojyo?" His voice deepened, making him age ten years in five seconds. "I don't--"

"You were awake last night, you shit-faced voyeur!"

"You woke me up screaming at Hakkai! I only pretended to be asleep 'cuz I knew you'd both shut up if you thought I was awake!"

Sanzo stared at Goku with frank amazement, his violet eyes quite wide. Normally, Goku could sleep through youkai attacks, tidal waves, and Gojyo writing "I AM A STUPID MONKEE" on his face with permanent marker. An argument shouldn't have awakened him any more than a single dust mote landing on Goku's cheek. "You really must be sick if you can't stay asleep. How much did you hear?"

"Enough." Goku's eyes had narrowed to thin golden slits. "Why didn't either of you tell me what's going on? Don't I need to know?"

"You wouldn't get it."

"But I do! Gojyo's sick, right? And it's not his fault, right?" A high tone of desperation rang in Goku's voice, like a cracked bell sounding sour notes. It occurred to Sanzo that the monkey needed to believe that his playmate hadn't tried to kill him of his own faculties. Otherwise, Gojyo might as well have chained him back up in that cave and left him to rot. "Hakkai's gonna find out what happened to him."

"It was the wave," Sanzo said, mentally screaming. He knew that by discussing things with Goku, he was raising a conversational white flag, but he never could seem to win against the hairless monkey in the end. "Hakkai's wasting his time and ours. If you feel good enough to bitch, then we should be heading out of here instead of sitting on our thumbs."

"Isn't he checking it out, though? Maybe he'll find something."

"And maybe I'm about to drop dead of a heart attack. So what? He's been running around talking to people since last night. And what's he found? Nothing. Nil. Dry-hump. Because there's nothing to find."

"Maybe." Goku didn't sound as if he believed Sanzo at all, an idea that chafed the monk to no end. It was as annoying as a day without cigarettes. Then, Goku said something that made him forget, for a few seconds, about the situation they were in:

"Sanzo... what's rape?"

-----

Zhi normally never drank with customers. The waitresses--back when he'd been busy enough to need a couple of barmaids--they were encouraged to drink with their clients. Good policy. Makes them seem more friendly, and makes them a lot more likely to get a fat tip. The barman was not. He viewed himself as sitting on high behind the countertop, giving but never taking liquor.

But that customer--whose name, he'd discovered in the first round, was Hakkai--really did have one of those smiles that put you right at ease. Zhi probably would have spilled his life story to the guy, if he'd made any indication that he was willing to listen. So when Hakkai had cast a confused glance at the dish of salt and cuts of lime he'd set down along with the shot glass, Zhi had elected to take a shot himself to demonstrate how to drink agave, rather than instructing him. And he had a few more, at the guy's insistence. All of his bones felt like they were filled with hot lead, and he had a great buzz going when he really shouldn't have been drunk or drinking at all. His instincts were rarely wrong, though, and Hakkai was a good man. He could feel it.

"Let me ask you something."

The words cut through his alcoholic haze, like a light-house beacon slicing into fog. "Mm? Against the rules. I listen. I don't talk."

Brief, staccato laughter. "Which is why I want to ask you. I confess, I've come here with a bit of an agenda."

"A which?" Hakkai's words were not nearly as rounded and liquid as his own, which was hardly fair. He'd taken twice as many shots as Zhi. The bartender knew that, high endurance or no, this was a sign of a dedicated alcoholic.

"A reason for being here."

"Agave?"

"No, not agave." One of the guy's eyes had completely disappeared: a band of light reflected off his one-eyed spectacle, turning it into a circle of flame. The other eye was curved close, something that seemed to go with the smile. "I have been trying to speak to people in this village... to see if anything odd is going on. No one seems to be aware of anything strange, but I am also an outsider. I don't engender trust."

Zhi didn't know why. He trusted him plenty, even if he only understood half of what he was saying at any point in time.

"So, I decided that there would be two groups of people most likely to hear everything that people are really thinking in this town... the priests and the bartenders." Hakkai twisted his empty shot glass into the dish of salt, which already had many wet, circular impressions in its surface. "Priests don't discuss what people confess, and you are the only bar open this day. I thought I might... give it a shot, you could say."

Zhi cackled a high, squeaky laugh. Puns were awesome.

"So, I ask you." Hakkai poured a thick knock of agave into the shot glass. He performed the dance of drinking with the skill of a surgeon: lick the salt, swallow the drink, briefly suck on the lime. "There are no youkai in this village, and you don't seem to have been attacked... what protects you all?"

"Now there's a funny thing," the bartender said, spinning his own shot glass in the dish of salt. He nearly lost control and sent it off onto the floor. "Would you believe me if I said that a yurei is protecting us from the youkai?"

-----

Oh, shits. This was not a conversation that Sanzo ever planned on having with Goku. The monkey had needed a lot of instruction about life once he'd been freed from the mountain: there was so much that he'd forgotten in the haze of hunger and loneliness over half a millennia. But even so, Sanzo figured that if there was anything people would never forget, it would be sex. Then again, maybe no one had bothered to instruct Goku about the birds and the bees before he'd been sealed away.

And Goku was looking at him curiously, not understanding why Sanzo had suddenly paled the slightest bit, or why his pupils (he could feel this happening) were retracting to pinpricks of black. The saru really didn't understand.

He'd start at the beginning. "All right. Goku, do you... do you know what sex is?"

The monkey looked confused. "You mean... like the difference between a boy and a girl?"

"No. I mean like fucking."

"Oh. Well, duh." Goku rolled his eyes. "You can't know Gojyo for too long without figuring out what THAT is."

He didn't know if he wanted to kill Gojyo or kiss him. "That makes it a little easier... Goku, rape is when... Rape is when you want to fuck somebody, but they tell you that they don't want you to, and then you do it anyhow."

A few moments of silence ensued, as Goku slowly processed this new information. "And it's a bad thing."

"It's the worst thing you can do to someone."

The boy's thoughtful expression deepened, then dissipated. His skinny, knobby shoulders shrugged. "Oh. OK. That's good, then."

"... what?"

"Gojyo'd never do anything to hurt Hakkai." Goku addressed Sanzo as if the monk were a young child who needed to be lectured, something that made murder thoughts rise up hot and red in his mind. "So he's really not himself."

"One-trick monkey, aren't you?"

"I am not!" At that moment, Goku's stomach made a loud gurgling noise. He moaned. "When are we gonna eat, Sanzo?"

"I'd call for room service, but that would involve coming in contact with that odious manager." Wrath wafted from his words, as waves of heat wafted up from pavement on a hot day. "When Hakkai gets back and I receive his written apology and confession as to how much smarter I am than him, I'll make him buy you some food."

"All RIGHT!" Goku's eyes were twin stars of joy. His smile took over his face. "I want six of everything they've got! Oh, Sanzo?"

The monk had begun to pick up his paper again. He gave Goku a horrid glare over the cusp of his glasses. "What now?"

"How come you've never tried to kill me?"

-----

"Yurei...? A ghost?"

"Yeah, yeah."

"That does sound rather difficult to believe..."

"Told ya." Zhi shakily poured himself another shot. "See... it musta been a year ago or so. Not too fucking long, anyhow. When the youkai were really gettin' into attacking every backwater they could find. We'd been attacked a few times, managed to fend 'em off. And all's a sudden, boom. The attacks stop. Youkai actually start detouring around us in order to go attack some other place. We're all, great. The less of those turds, the better, know what I mean?"

Hakkai's smile was friendly and welcoming. "So I've been told."

"Anyhow. Turns out that they're all attacking from the west, where that gigantic forest is. They used the forest for cover, since there's plains on all our other borders. And they were suddenly refusing to even step foot in the place. One of our pastors--"

"Pastor?"

"The priests who run the Virgin church. They're a different version than the ones you've probably met. They can have kids and wives and stuff."

"I... see." Midori eyes were watching his every move. It made Zhi feel like a bug on a pin.

"So this pastor, he decides that there's a big hoodoo kami out in the woods protecting us, and that since all the kami work for the Virgin, we should totally go out there and make a shrine for it. Honoring its service to the Virgin and all. He gets together a group of his students and they tromp out there. Dude comes back after half a day or so."

This was the gruesome bit. Zhi cast a bloodshot glance around the bar, making sure that the other tourists weren't listening in too hard, then leaned in close. The mixture of the agave on their breaths was overpowering, combined with the tangy smell of wet salt and lime juice.

"He comes back. He had three rug-monkeys, really annoying little brats, right? They were all whining at him at once, something about him not buying them any presents while he was gone. And he kills them. Just bashes their skulls in on the floor. His wife is shocked, but still angry enough to try to knock him out so she can call for the guards. He pins her down and rapes her."

Hakkai looked green about the gills, something that gave Zhi untold satisfaction. It was about time for the agave to hit Hakkai as hard as it was hitting him. "Rapes her."

"Yeah. Tried to kill her. She stabbed him to death with a carving knife."

"God."

"Yeah." Both men fell silent as they helped themselves to another shot. "Not only that, but when they went out of the village into the forest--looking for all the students he'd taken with him--they found 'em all dead."

"Killed by the pastor, I presume?"

"Yuh-huh. So the other pastors all freak right out. They say that it wasn't a kami after all. It was a yurei, maybe even an oni."

"Goodness."

"That's why the youkai stopped attacking," he said. He absently licked the remaining crust of salt off the edge of his shot glass. "They could only really get at us through the woods, otherwise we'd see 'em coming and arm ourselves. And when they stayed in the woods for too long... they'd start going fucknuts. Even more than before, you know."

"I think I do."

"Anyhow. Even the animals wound up abandoning the woods--either killing each other or running straight out of there. No one really knows where it came from or why, just that it's there. 's not like a youkai--youkai don't get that sneaky with their attacks, far as I can see. They'd rather kick your ass face to face. No one talks about it 'cuz they're scared of it hearing 'em."

"Why would you tell me, then?"

"You got an honest face."

Hakkai laughed. "Is there anything else about this yurei that I should know?"

-----

Sanzo gaped. He honestly had nothing to say: nothing that would not sound too much like an admission to something he simply wasn't going to face. Not that there was anything to face. He was brutally honest with himself. He knew how his own inner topography lay; he kept no secrets from himself. He had nothing to hide. He didn't know what the huge screaming deal was, anyhow. So he hadn't shot Goku. There were lots of people in Shangri-La he hadn't shot. Even people who clearly deserved it. Goku wasn't special. He hadn't shot either Gojyo or Hakkai, and that didn't mean anything, either.

Thankfully, his inner monologue was interrupted by the door slamming open. Both pet and master looked over to the doorway, to see who was there.

It was Hakkai. His smile was not his usual plastic grin: it was genuinely happy. His eyes were wide and glittering. He looked like he had just been informed by the gods that he was their most perfect and awe-inspiring creation. "I know what's wrong with Gojyo."

Sanzo found himself feeling weirdly thankful at the news, probably because it involved changing the subject. "So you're conceding the point."

"No. There's a yurei in those woods that drives people insane. It makes them do things they'd never normally do. Goku?"

"Mmmph?" The saru looked up. He was in the middle of attempting to eat his pillow.

"When you first met Gojyo last evening, before he attacked you... aside from the obvious, was there anything strange about him?"

Goku got a thoughtful look on his face as he continued to reflectively chew. "Gau da hoo messhu ih--"

"SPIT IT OUT, MONKEY!" Sanzo relished the noise that the paper fan made when it connected with the boy's thick skull. Invalid nothing, if Goku could eat pillows and make him look a fool, he could handle a little tough love.

Goku spat the pillow out; it was that or choke. "Aug! Sanzo, that hurt!"

"Talk, before I lose my patience."

"Oh. Uh... well, I think he was swimming. He was soaking wet."

Hakkai's eyes lit up like twin suns. "Excellent! That's perfect!"

"What is?" He was normally never out of the loop, and he didn't like being there now. "What are you going on about?"

Hakkai began to answer, but a loud rapping noise came from the door. Instead, the youkai opened it up.

"You smell like a whisky still," the voice that Sanzo had come to despise said.

"MURDER." Sanzo grabbed up his gun.

"Here's my bill," the manager said, handing a piece of paper to Hakkai, and thoroughly ignoring Sanzo.

"Bill...? For--this is for 30,000 yen!"

"Hey, do you do room service?" Goku chimed in.

"EXCRUTIATING TORMENT. Get out of the way, Hakkai."

"For window repairs," the manager said. "Your bondage boyfriend chewed through his ropes and broke my window trying to escape."

Silence fell over the remainder of the Sanzo-ikkou. Even the monk paused in his check to see if his gun was fully loaded. "Chewed... through?" Hakkai finally managed to ask.

"Given the mass of spitty ropes he left behind, yes. I tried to stop him, but he made off for those awful woods to the west of town. He kept screaming something about being cold and wanting to get dressed. Lost track of him after a bit. My advice? Next time, use either tranquilizers or chains. I'll be adding that cost to your current bill."

The manager coolly walked away, leaving the group still paralyzed by his news. Hakkai spoke first. "What now, Sanzo?"

The monk ground his teeth unconsciously. "We chase the pervert down and kill his new girlfriend in the woods. What else?"

"Your leadership skills never fail to astound me."

"Listen, you--"

"Sanzo, I still wanna eat!"

"Shut up!"

"But--"

"Shut up shut up! We're going!"

As they filed out--Sanzo grabbing his sutra and spare bullets, Hakkai in his khakis and his sleeping-shirt, and Goku still in his pajamas--the monk found himself shuddering in disbelief. Now that they were something approaching a normal group again, he missed its absence, and couldn't believe that he had secretly wished for everything to be as it was.

_-end-_

AFTER: "Agave" is the name of the plant used to make tequila. This is a rather vague reference to the drinking-game radio play, when Hakkai, rather excitedly, declares "Tequira!", right before Goku cries out "Biiru!" I heart Engrish.

Next section: "Kaiya". In which the Sanzo-ikkou locates the yurei, and Gojyo performs one final act of betrayal.


	6. Kaiya

"Beyond all Limits"

by Princess of Pain

Part VI: "Kaiya"

_NOTES: All of the usual character-based spoilers, plus references to episodes 48-50, and to episodes 3-5 of RELOAD: Gunlock. I also make a reference to Gojyo's past as it applies in the **manga**, something which isn't brought up in the anime, which will probably confuse the hell out of someone who doesn't know about it._

_In addition, formatting in this chapter goes like this:_

( ...text...) : Kaiya's speech

( _...italicized text..._ ) : Kaiya's images

_Italicized text _: Flashbacks and thoughts.

In spite of his life experience, there were few things in the world that Cho Hakkai actively despised. He'd once hated Chin Iisou, when that wicked bastard still 'lived', but he had learned that it was just as senseless to hate the dead as it was to idolize them: the restful dead did not care one way or the other, in a way that the living could see concretely. He didn't like the rain, but that had died down from an active hatred to a more inconvenient dislike as time scarred over the worst of his past. He hated the feeling of his fingers or toes wrinkling from laying too long in a bath, but that was a childish hate.

It may be fair to say that he hated nothing in the world right then like these forsaken woods.

He and the others had split up, after Hakkai had briefly explained all that Zhi had told him, at Sanzo's behest. The monk had pointed out that they would cover more ground more quickly if they went in three different directions. When Hakkai had quietly mentioned that the situation they were in was too dangerous to warrant separation, Sanzo, each word given unstable flesh in the cloud of smoke he was exhaling, said: "It's not like any of us have particularly quiet attacks. Or that there are any animals around to make white noise. It'll be no skin off my nose if you can't stand up to a piddling ghost long enough for us to charge in and save your goddamn bacon."

Which was fine. Sanzo needed the occasional bout of time by himself, without his companions to disrupt whatever killer thought processes went through the monk's mind. Goku was raring to go, his head full of ghost stories, ready to kick some ethereal tail and move on West. They could both seek the yurei; that was fine with Hakkai. He would sooner seek Gojyo.

He had no idea if that seemed irrational--his overwhelming need to heal his friend from whatever damage had been done to his mind. He guessed that wanting to save someone who, yesterday, tried to rape him was not the peak of intellectualism. And if it could really be as simplistic as that, Hakkai would be focusing his chi on any strange gatherings of unfamiliar energy, and not on the unique meld of youkai and human that shone in his mind like a magenta-red beacon. Nothing in his life was ever that simple, though.

He had to know that he would be able to one day look Gojyo in the eye again, and not feel his skin crawl with fear, something that love simply couldn't answer.

And, oh yes--he hated these woods. He was sweating harder than he ever had before: it was turning the powder blue of his shirt into a damp midnight wherever his body jointed. The canopy of the trees trapped murderous heat and humidity beneath itself, and it was high afternoon, bright as a copper coin in an oven. His hair stuck to his forehead in black triangular chunks. The unnatural quiet of the place did naught to soothe his nerves.

Though, if there had been white noise, he might never have heard that faint, strangled, despairing cry. It sent gooseflesh rippling up his back and arms, and turned all of his sweat into a coat of ice. The last time he'd heard anything like this, it had been coming from his own throat--when he'd made Chin Iisou believe that he had killed Sanzo. Then, he had been play-acting at agony. This, though... this was the embodiment of torment.

The gender of the voice was impossible to tell. As Hakkai ran towards where it had emanated from, he gathered his chi into a tight, concentrated circle about his body, invisible but strong. He had no idea if he was going to find Gojyo or the yurei, but either way, he needed to be prepared to either attack or to heal. If it was Gojyo, he sounded like he was dying.

-----

Lost. Confused. Hurt. Cold. He'd left the hotel room because he was cold. He was tired of sitting tied up and naked, and he wanted something to cover himself. He managed to get through the ropes (he still had threads of hemp caught in his teeth) and break out the window. And run away from the bad hotel man. Normally, he would have killed him, but he didn't feel like it. Something bad was creeping up on him and running around in his head. So he went to the woods, and found his clothes by the swimming-hole, and put most of them on, but before he could pull on his jacket, he smelled something womanish. A thick woman-scent, like perfume and pussy. It made him think of his mother. His mother hated him. He was supposed to be hated. He was an abomination. Hanyo were wicked evil stupid cruel nasty hateful. They were made to be despised. He was supposed to be hated. She hated him. His face burned where she'd cut thick lines that he'd completely deserved into his flesh. He could feel the cracks on his back where she had struck him with chairs and frying pans and the twangs in his stomach when she'd punched him or hit him with a dish and the strops on the backs of his legs when she'd whipped him with a wet slab of canvas and the cracks in his ribs from when she stove his chest in with firewood and ax handles the ax o no mother stop crying i'll do anything

anything

i promise

i close my eyes

-----

The flint made a soft, hissing click as it ground against the steel in his lighter, as ordinary magic produced a flame. Sanzo touched the tip of the flame to his cigarette. Maggots of fire birthed and whorled up along the tip of the dry paper, and smoldered in the tobacco leaves. He clicked it off, and took that first, most satisfying drag. Then, he removed the cigarette from his lips, so that he could fan himself and not risk putting it out.

The monk was not a master at sensing demonic energies--not like Hakkai, who could probably recite someone's birthdate and credit card number after looking at their chi--but he could certainly get a psychic gist of what was going on around him, and he didn't like it. When they had first entered the woods, and he'd opened up his mind to the flow of energy in the place, it had been shockingly empty. When they had separated, there still had been nothing. Now, all of the sudden, a bright burst. Nasty, volatile stuff, practically bleeding out from a hot core of activity that, as far as he could tell, he was the only one heading towards. Hakkai had gone in the opposite direction, and Goku was still too far off to his left.

The yurei had been hiding all this time--probably inside of Gojyo's skull, which would explain why Sanzo had felt nothing before. Maybe the kappa was dead, and it'd been forced to leave. Or maybe it'd cracked his head open while climbing out. The monk entertained happy fantasies of Gojyo's brains being ground beneath one of his sandals.

In any case, it was roughly ahead of him, and he damn well wasn't going to rush into battle without a good smoke beforehand.

-----

Hakkai had never known Gojyo to reveal too much emotion. Well, that was a slightly inaccurate statement: Gojyo did not reveal much _negative_ emotion. Oh, his eyes would occasionally darken with bad memories, and he would be uncharacteristically silent, and get far angrier about little things than he'd normally ever allow himself to be... but those moods were rare, at best. Gojyo had a knack for locking up whatever pain he had, then tossing the sealed-up pain into some inner ocean of his mind, adrift and lost and forgotten. It was a skill that Hakkai had done his best to emulate over the past three years.

The youkai had never once seen Gojyo cry.

Now, the hanyo was curled up against a tree, not far from a small pool of water--the one that, Hakkai presumed, Gojyo had been swimming in when the yurei came upon him. His brown leather jacket was abandoned on the ground at his feet, like an empty snakeskin. Other than that and his shoes, the other man was fully dressed for the first time in almost twenty-four hours. His hair hung lank and thick, like bloody silk, flattened with sweat and the heat. And from the tears slowly trickling down his face.

Gojyo was in a demi-fetal position, his arms loosely wrapped around his own body, his legs twisted up Indian-style. His face was a horror of agony: his eyes were squeezed shut, the thick lashes spidering together from the tears, his lower lip tucked firmly between his teeth. He looked five years old.

Hakkai's small heart broke. He moved to Gojyo's side. What had happened the night before no longer mattered; all he could think about was stopping Gojyo from crying, because such a thing was so out of balance, so off kilter. He cautiously touched the other man on his shoulder, as one would touch a wounded animal--an animal that might lash out.

Instead of a sloppy strike or another attempt to pin him to the earth, all he got was a barely audible whisper: "... i just wanted her to love me."

-----

The attack came fast.

Sanzo had almost smoked his cigarette down to the filter, feeling too sticky and overheated (not to mention the tiniest fissures of worry burning hairline cracks into the depths of his heart) to bother to simply toss it away and get the fuck on with it. He kept his mind open to the roiling energies ahead of him, though, which he figured would be enough to protect him.

He had not counted on those energies suddenly dissipating.

His eyes widened the slightest bit from surprise. He dropped his cigarette and stomped it out (tempted though he was to let it smoke until embers birthed embers birthed flames birthed forest fire that would wipe this fucking place off the map). His chakra burned as he forcibly widened his third eye--the one that usually only felt youryoku and familiar auras by raising the hackles on his neck. Where had--

--right fucking behind him.

His pistol was fully drawn and at the ready before the monk completed his turning run, whipping around and aiming behind the tree he'd been leaning against, his sandals grinding deep grooves into the loose earth. The gun went off. A hot flash, the stink of gunpowder which he barely even smelled anymore, the grinding kick of the pistol against his hand.

The azure bullet plummeted through nothing at all, and he cursed himself an idiot. If it was a ghost, a demon-banishing pistol probably wouldn't do him much good, and he wouldn't be able to see it; except that it was flying through the air on web-like wings towards him, shrieking in fury or in fear, and she had her fangs clearly bared, and one bright black eye glaring at him through the sheaf of red hair hanging in her face.

Sanzo corrected his aim. The gun kicked twice more. One bullet missed entirely. The other tore through one of her wings--bat-like wings, membranous and running from her hand to her lower thigh, more for gliding than for flying. A fine mist of blood sprayed out from the new wound, and the thing screamed in pain, then fell directly to earth.

The false priest was on her before she had a moment to pull herself to her feet. One heavy wooden sandal planted itself squarely on her wounded wing. Sanzo cocked his exorcism pistol in a non-verbal threat, as he looked over this creature, which resembled a mating between a bat and a human being. She had the wings, the fangs, the exaggerated ears, the leathery skin. Her red hair--the section that wasn't thick bangs hanging in her eyes--was sectioned into three giant ponytails that trailed over the skin on her bare back. Her top, which was made of a number of red ribbons winding around her breasts, did little to cover the pothooks and gnarled dots on the small of her back.

"Something is rotten in Shangri-La," Sanzo growled, "and it's you. What the FUCK is a youkai doing pretending to be a yurei?"

-----

Goku froze at the sudden spate of gunshots. His heart, which had steadily pumped out trillions of beats through worst situations than this without skipping, actually stopped for a moment. This forest was hinky and set him on edge, and Gojyo going crazy wasn't helping, and now, Sanzo was shooting something.

The saru loudly summoned up his nyou-ibo as he charged through the forest, correcting his course to take him back towards his master.

-----

"... it's all right, Gojyo." The converted youkai let go of the collection of chi he'd been holding onto, permitting it to circulate its typical course. Not that he wouldn't still be on guard, but Gojyo did not appear to be particularly dangerous at the moment. He knelt down beside the hanyo, the wet mud puddling around the pond soaking up into the knees of his khakis, and held him.

Gojyo's entire body hardened, every muscle turning into stone, then relaxed against his friend. The hanyo disengaged his arms from around himself to throw them around Hakkai, weeping, whatever words he was trying to say muffled into nothing against Hakkai's chest, tears mingling in with the sweat and the stress. He did not seem to remember that he'd wanted to violate Hakkai the night before, or that before that, he'd threatened Hakkai's life at least three times--nothing seemed to exist but his grief.

As far as the youkai could see, Gojyo was back in his childhood home, in a twisting nightmare of bruises, cuts, violent curses, and maddening, creaking bedsprings. What other "she" could he possibly be talking about?

-----

Warmth, love, acceptance. Everything he'd ever wanted, which would have been lovely except for the sudden interjection in his mind of

(kill him)

Something in his stomach curdled. That didn't sound right. It didn't sound like something he'd ever really do. Hakkai was his friend, he loved him--

(he betrayed you. he rejected you. just like your mother)

Now, that really didn't sound right. Hakkai never betrayed him.

(fighting struggling screaming pushing away teasing just out of your grasp close enough to feel but never close enough to touch. keeping you on a string jerking you around runaround run away shove off. or don't you remember how he shuddered in horror when you ran your hands over his)

A thick lump formed in his throat. More tears squeezed out of his eyes. The voice was rapid-fire logical, the iron induction of a swinging machete. Hakkai was his friend who didn't love him, but that did not sound right to him, but he couldn't really think of why. Everything was confusing and misting over. Whatever was in his brain had stopped running. It was just a voice, and maybe it wasn't something else, maybe it was just him talking to himself.

(you let him hug you for too long and he'll put a knife in your back. just like everyone else. you know it in your bones. he pushed you away before and he'll do it again. kill him)

And Hakkai was standing up, talking to him, looking over his shoulder and behind himself at a string of loud pops coming from some other universe, and so he did not see Gojyo pulling the shakujou from whatever dimension it rested inside until its master needed it.

-----

The youkai didn't verbally answer. She had to crane her neck to look at him. Her dark face was flushed with dirt and mud. One frighteningly empty sclera eye glared at him; the other was still hidden behind a thick fan of red bangs. She didn't have teeth; she had thick collections of needles jutting from her gums, or so it looked, and she wasn't afraid to bare them at Sanzo in reply to his question.

The monk fired another round. It bit into the earth between the index and middle fingers on the youkai's right hand, leaving behind a small, smoking hole. She shrieked. The noise was bone-chilling.

"I," Sanzo said, "have the power to kill you whenever the fuck I want to. Do you understand?" What he wanted was to exercise that power immediately, but that part of him was silenced by the more vindictive half of his personality--the one that wanted to hurt her more than a little and get some good information out of her, before ending her life.

That obsidian eye rolled in its socket towards the bullet-hole. If Sanzo had been capable of being freaked out, that would have done it. The youkai's eye appeared to move independently of the usual muscle restraints, baring the tendons that normally would never have seen the light of day for the monk's viewing pleasure. She seemed to look back at him, and subtlely nod.

"Damn right."

He ground his heel into the wound he'd left in her wing, gaining untold satisfaction from the slight ripping sensation that traveled up through the wood as her skin gave, and from another unholy scream. "I also have the power to inflict pain on you whenever the fuck I want to. If you don't keep that in mind, you will die in a painful manner. Do you understand?"

Another slight nod.

"Answer my question. What is a youkai doing pretending to be a yurei?"

The youkai was still pensive, so he gave her a more clear motivation, by way of stepping on her wounded wing and digging in his heel once more. She screamed, but that was not what Sanzo was occupying his thoughts with. What concerned him was the rather sudden intrusion of a genderless voice in his head:

(It isn't my fault! Humans made that up!)

The monk blinked. "Telepathy." Given the condition of the youkai's mouth, it wasn't entirely shocking that she would develop other ways of communicating. "All right. If you're not trying to make people believe that you're a yurei, then what the hell are you doing? Attacking your own kind, driving them insane--I thought you youkai were all together under Kou Gaiji's banner."

He got the mental impression that she wanted to vomit at the mention of Kou Gaiji's name. Not an assassin from the idiot youkai prince, then...

"So what are you doing? I don't particularly give a tin shit about Gojyo one way or the other, but those other two lackeys of mine will be mighty sore if you don't put him back the way he was."

She grinned. Sanzo saw more teeth in her mouth than he'd cumulatively viewed in his life. (One of those lackeys isn't going to be around much longer.)

"If they can't defend themselves, they deserve to die. If you hesitate again, it will be the last thing you do on this earth. What--did you do--to Gojyo?!"

Sanzo stomped down hard on the bullet-wound, earning more agonized noises from the youkai, and punctuated his sentence by jamming the barrel of his pistol against the back of her skull. He didn't know it, but a rather ghoulish smile was on his face.

"Do tell me all about it."

-----

_No... no, I..._

(yes you do know. you remember what he did. you remember how much you hate despise anguish lust never teasing suck grasping fury want follow cry need rejection)

He shifted his weight from foot to foot, his body swaying slightly. He tightened and relaxed his grip on the bo-staff sector of his shakujou. Hakkai wasn't even looking at him, he was still looking off into the woods, where more loud noises were coming

(and he never looks at you. remember that. he never has and he never will. betrayed you. left you. just like jien. just like mother when she)

screams and pops like gunshots from Sanzo's

(don't forget him either. hakkai and sanzo, they work together to)

pistol.

Gojyo lunged.

-----

She did not respond aloud, but the monk began to receive a stream of images, impressions and words--albeit reluctantly.

(_Gojyo, wandering through the forest, grumbling under his breath about idiot monkeys who pull out hair. He spots the small pond. Grins. Begins to shed his clothing, loudly declaring that the heat was too much to take without at least a quick dip._ This is how I find them, too close to my lair _A tree, huge and looming. The youkai_ Kaiya _is dangling by her back-claws from one of the bigger, upper branches, arms wrapped tightly around her body in sleep. She opens her weird sclera eyes and looks down, spotting Gojyo_ Joy, finally, at last)

"At last what? What the hell was so special about him? I can promise you that he's not as wonderful as you seem to think."

(_The hanyo sinks down into the pool, blissfully unaware of what hangs above him. Kaiya unbinds her arms. The red ribbons wrapping around her breasts glint dully in the shadowy light, almost in contrast to the black leather pants that clad her legs. She sinks_ Flying, gliding, swinging ever lower, they never notice _until Gojyo opens his eyes, sensing her youryoku, and he's suddenly armed and swinging the blade of his shakujou through the air, the scythe-like instrument whirling on its chain, plummeting towards her_)

The pictures and sounds dulled, then washed away. Sanzo blinked. For a few seconds, he had almost believed that he was actually there, watching the scene unwind in real time. "You have ten seconds to answer my question, before I blow your fucking head off."

Kaiya opened her thickly-fanged mouth. The monk supposed that she was screaming--her throat was corded with tension, and he could see the exhalation of air from her lungs--but she made no sound that his ears could pick up.

She was suddenly a bundle of struggle: pulling up and trying to knock him off of her, in spite of his weight tearing the hole in her wing ever wider, making gruffling little whines, legs and arms flailing away. Sanzo flipped his gun about, holding the barrel, and cracked the crown of Kaiya's skull with the heavy rubber grip. She went limp--stunned, he could only presume. Her head whipped around with the action, knocking her pigtails and her bangs askance, baring the other side of her face.

Her other eye appeared to have fallen out. Nothing existed there but a bare, gaping socket.

-----

He should never have turned his back on Gojyo. Not for a second.

Normally, he never would have. But Sanzo's gun going off distracted him--three shots, grouped loosely together. It could only mean that the monk was being attacked, but no matter how he focused his chi, he couldn't tell if the yurei was winning or losing. All he could sense was its (her?) roiling energy, and Sanzo's hot, golden aura.

He'd let Gojyo go, and taken a few steps towards where their energies lay, his worry only increasing with the screams that ensued, not to mention another gunshot. He talked to Gojyo as he moved, still trying to verbally soothe him, when--

The all-too-familiar sound of the moon-shaped shakujou blade sinking into flesh rang through the air. It sounded like an ax dividing a watermelon in two.

Hakkai cried out, verdant eyes widening. Gojyo shoved the blade in even further. The smell of shorn copper rose up in the sickening heat as the twin edges of the blade jutted out of his back, blood darkening the back of his shirt. More billowed out of his stomach, like plumes of crimson smoke from a devil's cigarette.

Everything in Hakkai turned to ice.

Gojyo grinned.

His teeth were stained with blood.

"Getting tired... of hurting everyone else," he said, and leaned on the shakujou a bit harder, driving it deeper into his own body. He'd planted the thick, blunt blade into the earth, giving him enough leverage to impale himself. And was it mad to think that for the first time in a day, Gojyo actually sounded like... well, like himself? "... 'bout my turn..."

And the hanyo gave out, collapsing backwards, his weapon (now dirty with his own blood) falling out of the earth to land atop him. Sunset-colored eyes--eyes still wet with tears--were already shut into the blissful peace of unconsciousness before his body even struck the earth. And in spite of the horrific wound he'd dealt himself, he was grinning.

-----

As Sanzo watched, the eye socket filled.

It glared at him, red and raw and disturbingly empty (and reminding him of things about Hakkai which he'd rather not dwell on at the moment), and as he stared back, he noticed a bud of muscle and jelly growing in its base. This was not hallucination. He could see the sunlight hitting her face and shadowing in the socket, and he could see those shadows being pushed out of the way by a swelling ball of thew, pink and pulsing, like a parasitical youkai developing right before him. Purple and red veins beat hard in time with its growth spurt, until it filled the empty socket.

Ink-black swirled over the muscle mass, and he found himself looking into the mate of her sclera eye.

"Oh, balls," he said beneath his breath. For the first time in a very, very long time, Sanzo felt a slight queasiness in his gut. "What--"

(_A youkai--Kaiya--inside a house, looking out of a window. Two windows come into view. A Kaiya stands at each window. The house comes into view; the windows are actually set into Kaiya's face. They fly open, and the Kaiyas charge forth._)

He couldn't help but feel mildly fascinated. That was an after-affect of possession with which he was unfamiliar. He started to say something else, but

(he'll leave you. you know that)

tendrils wrapped around his mind in a loving stranglehold--like the web of the spider woman, or that gigantic suit of armor that called up so many horrible thoughts. Maybe both. It felt like a nasty god was stirring its fingers in his brain, calling up every evil memory he'd ever had and forcing him to relive them all at once. Were his brain not running through six different timelines at the same time, he would have cursed himself an idiot, and regretted not shooting her the instant she'd appeared.

Sanzo jerked back, accidentally squeezing off a panic shot that roared uselessly into the earth

(koumyo left you. he was the only one who cared about you and he's gone dead bye now. and who killed him? those youkai)

and found himself no longer quite so scornful of Gojyo's brain. The voice was so asexual and persuasive that it might well have been one of his own. He continued to back away from her, as if by putting physical distance between them, he could loosen her clutching hooks

(what are you doing, sanzo? you used to be smarter than that. you used to know better that the only good youkai was a dead one. they are going to betray you. goku will)

That did it. Sanzo opened his intensely violet eyes. His manic grin was firmly in place. He clubbed himself in the temple with the butt of his pistol, summoning up a cavalcade of pulsing, bloody galaxies in his vision. He could see Kaiya through the haze of stars, as the hateful bitch uttered another one of those silent screams. Her eyes had begun to sink back into her head; now, they were bulging from their sockets.

Sanzo cocked his pistol, which was aimed dead-bang between her creepy eyes. "You picked the wrong guy to plant mistrust in," he told her. "I don't trust any of them in the first place."

He pulled the trigger. A dry _click!_ was all he got for his pains. Empty chambers.

"Oh, fuck me hard," the monk said. Five shots; he'd fired five shots, and of all the shitty pistols he'd had to pick, it had to be a five-shooter and not a six-shooter. No speed-reloader, and no time to summon up the Makai Tenjou. And Kaiya had picked herself off the earth, the blood black and crusted around her gaping wound, but she was grinning. Red ribbons and black leather shifted and creaked as she threw herself forward--

--and ran straight into an aurum globe, attached to a thick red staff, attached to--

"Goku!" In spite of himself, Sanzo was almost glad to see the saru come charging out of the woods. After all, it saved him the effort of skipping, dodging, and performing what Gojyo had once referred to as the Sanzo-Houshi-Sama Flea Dance of Death.

As Goku threw down with the youkai, Sanzo leaned up against the nearest tree, and peacefully lit a cigarette.

-----

Goku didn't really understand what in hell's name was going on. After all, the monster was supposed to be a ghost, and according to the ghost stories that Hakkai had occasionally told, yurei weren't solid. He'd only lashed out with his nyou-ibo out of instinct, and had been both surprised and pleased to see that, as with a youkai, it shattered her face. She looked like she was wearing a crimson veil from her nose down.

As always, the not-quite-youkai did best when he thought least, and continued his first thrust all the way through, knocking her to the earth. He pounced her, jamming his nyou-ibo down against her throat to hold her in place. Her eyes were creepy, like two living olives in her face, and they bugged out as she swiped at him, dirty claws swinging through the air, leaving a humming noise in their wake. An uttered command, and his weapon jointed into something that would give ordinary nunchucks penis envy. Using the longer middle section to continue to pin her down by the throat, Goku pummeled her skull with the articulated ends, producing a series of noises that reminded him of a steel drum being played with bare fists.

A nasty pain suddenly clawed into his neck, like a bear was trying to bite his head off--she had grabbed him with her thickly-clawed feet. She yanked him off of her, and actually threw him a few meters back with the considerable strength of her legs, then rose up, coughing and touching her neck, which was bruised like hell. She looked like someone had smeared grape jelly all on the inside of her skin.

"Oi, Sanzo!" he said, correcting the nyou-ibo to its usual bo-staff formation, a grin on his face. "She seems pretty tough!"

"Would you just kill her already?"

"Oh... uh--"

She swooped at him--as much as she could swoop, with that wounded wing of hers. He jabbed out at her with his weapon, the heavy globe at its tip striking her ribs, and--from the wet crunch that traveled up its staff and through his arms--shattered more than a few of them. She opened her mouth to scream, but Goku couldn't hear any noise that she might have made. He felt, for a few seconds, like something was scrabbling around at the base of his mind

(cave. and he turns away)

and ignored it. He was too used to the occasional flood of almost-memories to be distracted at a time like this.

The yurei-thing gripped onto the end of the nyou-ibo, and used it as leverage to flip herself into the air. Most of the ribbons wrapping around her torso were misplaced by his attack, looping down away from her breasts in favor of her stomach. She had more teeth in that maw than Goku cared to get too close to, and all of them were chomping as she clumsily--but quickly--soared at him.

He held up his weapon over his head, and clubbed her midair, swatting her down to earth like an oversized horsefly. "Maybe not," he muttered, then commanded the nyou-ibo to elongate, aiming it at her chest. The staff plunged through the air and plowed through her chest and into the earth, pinning her like a menu outside of a restaurant. She bled, choked, and made raging, gurgling noise for only a second, before a bright flash of light took her away and blew her into so many pieces, as inconsequential as dried leaves.

"That blows," Goku griped, childishly stamping his foot as he permitted the nyou-ibo to pass back to its other plane. No evidence of their scuffle remained, save for a thick hole in the earth and a few small patches of blood. He felt oddly disappointed. Ever since Kou Gaiji had been possessed, he hadn't been challenged once in an actual one-on-one battle. It was more than a little frustrating.

The saru turned to Sanzo, hearing only the tail end of something the monk was saying to himself: "... that I mistrusted them." Whatever that was about. Sanzo had not finished smoking his first cigarette. His pale skin was flushed with the heat, his blonde hair almost brown with sweat, but he looked content. The corners of his mouth were even turned up in the slightest bit of a smile.

"I could be wrong," Sanzo said.

Goku gaped. His heretical eyes grew steadily wider, until it seemed that they must roll out of his skull. Sanzo gave him a glare. "What?"

"Is everyone all right?"

Sanzo shifted, glancing over Goku's shoulder at the upcoming voice. "Yeah. The youkai is dead."

"Youkai...?" Hakkai sounded distinctly winded. Goku did not turn to look and see why; he was still busy gawking at Sanzo. "I thought..."

"Long story." The monk took a long drag. "I see you found him. Did you actually drag him all this way?"

"Yes."

Sanzo shook his head. "I really don't get you at--Goku, what the hell do you think you're looking at? Is there something hanging out of my nose?"

The saru turned and looked at Hakkai. The converted youkai was just as flushed and sweaty as Sanzo looked and Goku felt. He had an unconscious Gojyo in a full nelson. The hanyo's leather jacket was balanced precariously on his shoulders; his headband dangled from one of Hakkai's back pockets. "Hakkai, I think I'm going crazy, too."

"Pardon?"

"I just heard Sanzo admit that he could be wrong."

"Shut the FUCK up, bakasaru!"

Goku, who successfully fought gods, countless youkai, summoned fiends, and shikigami with no issues, was as usual unable to dodge Sanzo's paper fan. "Aa! Sanzo, I--"

He found himself fending of a hail of thwaps from the fan, the monk raving all the while about idiot monkeys and their stupid ideas, while Hakkai sat back and laughed.

_-end-_

Next section: "Schisms". In which the manager and Sanzo face off for the last time, and Gojyo has some rather important things to express to Hakkai.

AFTER: Holy shiznit. I wrote action. dance Anyhow, there's still one more section to go, and at least one more twist in the works for this arc. Excitement, all of you! Excitement!

Also, some have observed that the thought processes of the characters--Gojyo, Sanzo and Kaiya--appear fragmented and incomplete. They are supposed to be this way. Any broken sentences, or sentences that trail off, or anything like that--it's supposed to. This was to attempt to illustrate the fractured mental states of those characters as they were possessed/being possessed. In Kaiya's case, her statements are mostly left incomplete, because they're actually a constant, running monologue in either Gojyo or Sanzo's heads, and if I spent all my time writing what she said, I'd have no room for their actions.

Finally, Sanzo's 'I could be wrong' is supposed to be regarding his previous statement about how he doesn't trust any of his comrades. I hope I made that clearer in this draft.


	7. Schisms

"Beyond All Limits"

by Princess of Pain

Part VII: Schisms

_NOTES: Spoilers here are limited to the "it ain't nothing you haven't seen before", regarding this whole arc. Another thing about formatting: italics are used both to indicate specific thoughts, and to indicate flashbacks. If a thought, I've done my best to preface it with "He thought, '...'." If a flashback, it'll be a free-standing sentence with no such qualifiers. Just to try and avoid confusion._

Gojyo did not wake up until they reached town, and were not far away from their hotel. The ragged band carried his unconscious ass most of the way--Hakkai walking backwards and hooking his arms around Gojyo's armpits, and Sanzo and Goku each taking a leg. Carrying the comatose hanyo was like hauling a wooden statue about, and the wet heat of the day only made the experience that much more pleasant.

Goku was the first one to notice that Gojyo had awakened. Both Hakkai and Sanzo were borderline arguing, over whether or not the monk should be permitted to murder the hotel manager when they went inside. Hakkai was artfully dancing through the conversation, attempting to placate Sanzo, who would have none of it. He wanted blood. Goku, who had only the dimmest idea of what the manager might have done to piss Sanzo off so royally, happened to glance down and meet--rather than a slack, dirty face and a slight line of drool edging out of Gojyo's mouth--a pair of fiery, confused eyes.

Goku gave his master a nudge. "Hey, Sanzo? Gojyo's awake."

"Finally." The monk released Gojyo's leg; Goku followed Sanzo's motion, depositing Gojyo's ass quite firmly onto the earth. Hakkai quickly turned him loose and took a few steps back, as if he wasn't sure whether or not Gojyo would explode on contact with the ground.

The hanyo made a pained, hissing noise. "Fuckin' shit, Sanzo! What the hell's the matter with you?! Dumping my ass in the dirt--" He bestowed a glare upon Sanzo that promised certain doom.

"Are you done? I'm ready to get out of here, personally."

"When are we gonna EAT?" Goku added helpfully. "I wanna--"

"It'll have to wait. Thanks to Gojyo, we lost most of a day of travel. We need to make up for lost time and head out now."

"Thanks to..." Gojyo looked rather bamboozled. "What'd I do? You trying to blame your shortcomings on me, you stinking monk?"

"Sanzo, don't--" Hakkai started.

"You," Sanzo said, his eyes like suns, "have tried to kill me entirely too many times in the past day. You almost killed Goku, and you've done worse than that to Hakkai. I don't need to blame whatever nonexistent flaws you think I have on you. You've got plenty of your own, you perverted kappa."

The redhead began to speak, then cut himself off. He looked up at the three of them rather stupidly, as if he was suddenly incapable of understanding their language. Goku guessed that Gojyo didn't have any memory of what he'd done--it was the only reason why he'd look so utterly nonplussed about what Sanzo was talking about.

In any case, the moment spun out tense and awkward, with Hakkai still looking at Gojyo with a wariness that had never been there before, and Sanzo looking at him like the hanyo was a dab of dogshit on his robes. Goku didn't like it. And, as most often happened when such moments occurred, he concluded that it was time for him to act out.

He pounced onto Gojyo, his small fists pummeling his adversary's belly and head, bellowing some nonsense about how if Gojyo ever tried such a stupid sneak attack again, Goku would rip off his head and shit down his neck-pipe. Gojyo--screaming about how once again, the monkey broke the unwritten rules of combat with a sneak attack of his own--had him in a death-grip in seconds flat, planting Goku's face squarely in the hanyo's armpit, and telling him that if he ever touched Gojyo's hair again, this would be the last sensation he'd have on Earth. Given that Gojyo hadn't bathed in over a day, the damp reek of spent adrenaline, blood and sweat was unholy.

But still and all, it was better than that nasty tension that had gripped the air between them and turned it to steel walls, breaking everything apart.

-----

Sanzo stood in the doorway of the hotel. He felt like the star of a bad Western, at the door of a saloon, commanding the local Jack of all Ass to a shoot-out at high noon. He gave a glare to his mortal enemy.

The manager sat behind his desk, prim and proper. Hakuryu was curled up on the desk before him, being thoroughly petted and sweet-talked. That turncoat. The tiny dragon's belly was slightly distended--from, Sanzo could presume, the bits of chocolate that were being fed to him. The manager glanced up mid-coo, his eyes like chips of ice once they focused on Sanzo. "Oh. You're back. I didn't think you'd be returning."

"Hakuryu!" Hakkai cried out from behind him.

The dragon looked up and voiced an amiable 'kyuu'.

"Quit feeding my car chocolate before I shoot you, fuckmook," Sanzo growled. His trigger finger itched.

"With your pistol or your gun?" The manager held up the tiny dragon. "I thought you were all skipping out without paying your considerable bill, so I liberated the objects that you'd left behind in your haste as a reward. He's quite a cutie. I'll be sad to let him go, but yen is the currency I work with, not dragons."

Hakuryu sailed out of his hands and past Sanzo's head, towards his relieved master.

"Now, then. We accept credit cards and cash, but personal checks are out of the question. How will you be paying--" he looked down at his ledger, which of course was laid out not far from where Hakuryu had been "--40,000 yen?"

Sanzo felt a muscle spasm below his eye. "The rooms were to cost 5,000 yen."

"And I'm charging you for moving you to another room," he said easily, "plus for the window. Or had you forgotten? Cash or credit card?"

"I'LL--" Suddenly, Sanzo appeared to calm down entirely. He didn't smile, precisely, although the corners of his mouth turned up the slightest bit. He elbowed Hakkai, who--still listening in--obediently handed him the blessed credit card he'd ginked for his drinking binge. Sanzo walked up to the counter and clapped the small rectangle of plastic down atop the ledger.

"I've heard of Amex," the manager said coolly, looking down at the card before picking it up. "Do they have a good line?"

He glanced up as the barrel of Sanzo's pistol whip-cracked him bang between the eyes. A small trickle of blood ran from the new cut there, as he dropped to the floor, utterly stunned.

"S-sanzo!" Hakkai exclaimed.

"The monk wants to be a pirate," Gojyo said, a wondering tone in his voice.

Sanzo picked the card back up and tucked it into his pocket, then hurried behind the counter, and collected what they'd left behind--Goku's bloody clothes, Hakkai's shredded shirts, his own stained robes--and gave the manager a swift kick in the ribs for good measure. "Fuckin' hentai!" he spat, then nimbly leapt over the countertop. "We need to get out of here now, before he wakes up and calls the police."

With a whispered word from his master, Hakuryu turned into Jeepu, and the Sanzo-ikkou gladly piled in and headed out.

-----

This was going to suck.

Gojyo stood outside of the hotel room, glaring at its smoothly painted surface, as if it were the reason why he was in this mess in the first place. He was still out of cigarettes--and Sanzo had beaten the shit out of him with that stupid paper fan for stealing his, when he was crazy. Going without for too long made everything have a cast of unreality, like he was walking around in a dream from which he couldn't wake, but that wasn't the excuse for what he was feeling here.

No one had wanted to share a hotel room with him, once they'd stopped at this new town. There were only two rooms to be had. Sanzo had nearly thrown a fit and declared that he'd rather rape himself with his pistol than be anywhere near Gojyo, and Goku (not without a bit of panic in his eye) had claimed that he snored too much and that he still stank. Hakkai had been silent, and that was what hurt the most: the silence was rejection so obvious that it didn't need to be pointed out.

When the bickering got to epic proportions, Gojyo had volunteered to camp out for the night. It wouldn't have mattered much to him either way. He'd been on his own for so long, when he was far too young to pay rent on anything but a cardboard box. He was used to shitty sleep conditions. And he was used to sleeping with one eye open. No big deal. Except that when he'd said it, Hakkai's eyes had darkened, with fear or with sadness, and quietly stated: "That won't be necessary."

The stinking monk had snorted and muttered something beneath his breath about being surrounded by idiots. Then he and his monkey went off to their room--to gripe, to fight, to fuck, whatever it was they did when they were actually alone. Gojyo wouldn't know.

He knew that Hakkai was afraid of him. That knowledge made him hate himself.

Gojyo opened the door.

The room was no different than the dozens they'd stayed in over the course of their journey West--two beds, night-stand table, wash-tub, tiny bathroom, postage-stamp window. It could have been his room at home, if it'd been a bit messier. Hakkai was sitting on the bed he'd claimed for the night. A lamp on the night-stand was turned up full blast, illuminating the youkai with a sun-like light. He was sewing the delicate clasps on his shirt back into place. Beside him were Goku's clothes--still dirty but stitched whole--and his other shirt, which was also fully doctored.

Something in Gojyo's heart collapsed at the sight of that.

The youkai looked up at him casually, not missing a stitch. The light from the lamp gleamed off his monocle and his youryoku limiters. "I was wondering why you were taking so long. You said you'd only be stepping out for a minute."

He'd lied. He'd only stepped out of the hotel room, and only to stand there, transfixed and glaring at the door, trying to figure out how in blue fuck he was going to express what was wrong with him without losing Hakkai. That hadn't worked too well. "I got distracted."

"I see." He looked back down at his needlework.

Gojyo, his lank frame moving with his usual sly grace, loped over to his own bed and laid down. He kept a clear girth of Hakkai as he walked. He instinctively reached in his pocket for a cigarette, and uttered a soft "ch'" when that familiar paper box did not magically appear in his hand.

"You should let me have your shirt," Hakkai said. "It still has bloodstains and holes in it. You can wear your jacket until I get the worst of the blood out."

Gojyo looked down. Two gaping, bloodstained holes stared back at him. If Hakkai hadn't been there to close his self-inflicted wounds, he would have died. _Maybe Hakkai shouldn't have been there,_ he thought, not just a little bitter and self-piteous.

"We need to talk," the hanyo said. Words which made anyone in any relationship, friendship or otherwise, quake in their souls.

The youkai glanced up from his work. His eyes were as bright and empty as the sun reflecting off a sheet of green glass. "Yes?"

"I." What would he say? Was there any way to explain, other than flat-out stating what was going on? Probably not. "I remember everything."

Hakkai's eyes widened. He set down his shirt and the needle, and rotated on the bed, giving Gojyo his full attention. "... then why did you behave as--"

"Because if Sanzo knew, he'd kill me. And if Goku knew... well, fuck." Gojyo absently raked his fingers through his hair, giving the ends a slight tug. "The kid's been through enough shit. I don't want him to know. It's better for them to think that I was possessed, you know?"

"Are you trying to say that you weren't? You heard Sanzo's side of the story. What he described sounded like telepathic possession to me."

"It wasn't. It..." His nervousness, his self-loathing, and his lack of education left him grappling for words. "It's like... okay. You know how annoying Goku gets."

"I understand how easily he gets under your skin, yes."

"Whatever." Gojyo felt uneasy under Hakkai's scrutiny. It certainly did not make his life any easier at the moment. "So Goku gets really annoying, and he's driving me up the wall. And I get pissed. I beat the crap out of him, but I'd never kill him or anything. Because you get it grilled into you from childhood that murder is bad. And you understand that you're just angry, that you're not angry over anything special, and that you don't really want to kill anybody that's not outright attacking you. Right?"

"Are you talking about your conscience, Gojyo?"

He shook his head. "No, no. It's not like that. It's like... a wall in your mind. Keeps you from doing things you shouldn't do. Starts with an 'i'? Inny something?"

Hakkai's brow furrowed for a moment. "Inhibitions?"

"That's it." Gojyo reached for a cigarette, and was once again disappointed. He chewed on his lip instead. God, he needed a tobacco fix. "Inhibitions. Only with what she was doing, she wouldn't let me stop. She didn't let them work. If they're walls, she knocked them all down. So when Goku wandered up and started apologizing, I thought about how annoying he was, and how I'd like to beat the shit out of him. Then I thought about how I'd like to kill him, and the murder thought got stronger, until I _wanted_ to kill him, and so I tried."

_He decided that he wanted to kill him._

"Gojyo."

"So when I tried to kill Sanzo, it was because I really wanted him dead."

_"I think that I'll kill you."_

"I tied up Hakuryu because I couldn't stop myself."

_"What I wanted was just to pet it. It's so damn cute. But it wouldn't let me pet it, so I tied it up what good."_

"And, and--"

"Gojyo, stop."

He couldn't; his mouth was on a bullet train of thought that mere calming words would not cease. "I tried to rape you. I really can't believe I did that. God, the last thing I ever wanted to do was to hurt you. But I didn't do it because I wanted to violate you or beat you down or tear you up. I did it because. Well, I like you. A fuck of a lot. And I didn't understand that that's not something you would want, not really. I just didn't get it. I..."

_He decided that he wanted to love him. _

_"You ffffffffucking tease! You can't look as good as you and not know it. You know but you think you're too fucking good for me. I know you."_

_"I love you so fucking much."_

Hakkai uttered a trembling sigh. His best friend had paled considerably as he spoke; he looked like he'd been scrubbing his skin with rice-milk. He picked up his shirt and his needle, and slowly (but without any quavering hands to betray the slightest thought) began to stitch once more. "I see."

Gojyo wanted to scream. He understood that this was just how Hakkai kept his shit together when something happened that he had difficulty handling, but that made it no less frustrating. "Can't you say something else? I don't know, something that might let me think that you were actually listening?"

The glare he got would have been more at home on Sanzo's face than in Hakkai's. He could see the reproach and the warning signs without Hakkai having to say anything, but his idiot mouth never let such things stop him. "I'm trying really hard to get something across here, and, you know, it'd be a lot easier if you weren't sitting pretty like you didn't give a shit."

Hakkai snapped. He wasn't angry--at least, not nearly as angry as Gojyo knew he could get--but he was probably about as pissed as he'd let himself be. "Gojyo, all of my actions hinged on the belief that you were not in control of what you were doing. Goku and Sanzo acted under the same assumption. How am I supposed to react when you tell me that you did those things_ because you wanted to?_ Were you expecting a congratulatory word? A pat on the back? Celebratory sex?"

"Hakkai!"

The converted youkai's hands moved ever faster in their binding stitches. "What were you expecting? No one likes hearing that they're the target of murderous desires. Or that the man they believed to be their best friend would ever seriously consider raping them--"

"I didn't say that!"

"Why did you tell me this?" His eyes were as flat and expressionless as an endless field of asphalt. "I was happier not knowing. I was happier thinking that this could be buried. I just wanted to forget that it ever happened, I wanted to look you in the eye and not panic, I wanted to be able to see you smile and not think about the way you grinned when you, you--"

Hakkai jabbed himself good and hard with the needle, the slender drive of metal slipping up under his fingernail. He viciously swore (did he actually hear Hakkai swear?) and pulled it out, then put his finger in his mouth instinctively. His eyes never left Gojyo's. They glared at him, plainly communicating without words that...

"It's all my fault." The hanyo stood, somehow, even though his legs felt like cooked ramen. He couldn't look Hakkai in the eye, not when his friend was looking at him as if he'd never seen him before. Hakkai had never looked at him that way, not even on the night they'd met. That smile in the rain had been one of familiarity and welcoming, calling him back to where he didn't know he belonged, to what he'd been looking for his entire fucking life.

Idly, Gojyo wondered whether or not being a hanyo had anything to do with this. It seemed to have everything to do with everything else in his life--every punch and kick he'd ever taken from his mother, the incessant creaking of her bed (and the moans, they both made noise, Jien sounding like a rabbit caught in a trap). The empty doorway and the corpse left behind by his brother. Perhaps, he thought, digging into his own pain a bit more, hanyo really were destined for bringing misery, not just owning it.

His fingers unconsciously traced over the holes in his shirt, stiff with dried blood. No, that wasn't right. There were limits in everyone's mind that kept them from crossing over boundaries that were clearly laid out. There were places where no one was supposed to go, not without some serious consequences, in every friendship and relationship. He'd been unable to stop himself from doing some horrible shit, and that wasn't the same as wanting to do it.

It was not until he glanced back over at Hakkai that he realized that he'd spoken that last thought aloud. Not knowing if he'd dig his grave any deeper for the effort, he did what came naturally, and began to babble once more. "When I started to get more control of myself, when that dirty bitch had been split between her body and mine, because Sanzo got too close for her comfort--that was when Kaiya tried to force me to kill you. Before that, she just let me run wild, and I managed to fuck up things plenty on my own. Like usual. But she wasn't holding down all of my walls anymore. She couldn't... she actually had to try to trick me into doing it. And I decided that what I wanted was to die. If it came between killing you and killing myself, I'd rather be the one to punch out. I just didn't want to cause anymore pain."

_"I thought it was okay for Mom to kill me... as long as it would make her stop crying."_

Gojyo lightly scratched his cheek, where the raised, dark scars lay like brands against his tanned skin, for time and all eternity. They felt almost crinkly and rough beneath his fingertips. His other hand reached once more for the pack of cigarettes that wasn't there. "Hakkai, I am... well, you know. I'm sorry. I don't apologize too easily. But I am. Sorry, I mean. If I could take it back, I think I'd give up a whole hell of a lot to make it happen. What do you... what do you want me to say?"

The youkai--he stopped himself short of mentally addressing Hakkai as his friend--looked like he'd been punched in the face by a stranger. He'd completed the repairs on his shirt; it and the needle were resting indifferently at his side. When he spoke, he kept his head lowered, staring directly at the floor, shielding his eyes behind his monocle and a sealed eyelid. "I want you to make one thing perfectly clear. Tell me that your inhibitions kept you from even considering what you did last night under any other circumstances."

"Yes." Utter certainty turned his voice to steel.

"And, what she did was actually making you do things you normally wouldn't."

"Yes."

"Based off of things that you would normally do, only taken to negative extremes."

"Well, yes." The temper of his steel words was apparently cheap. "I mean, I guess."

"Explain."

A glib, smartass response popped out before he could stop it, something that he blamed on his utter lack of cigarettes: "If I was going to seduce you, I'd start out with dinner and a chick flick. Get you weepy and pliant."

The instant he stopped speaking, Gojyo closed his eyes. His stomach tensed up, like a washboard made of iron slats. His jaw locked. He would never be able to admit it to himself or to anyone else, but the knee-jerk reaction of his brain was to prepare himself for a shit-rain of hard-fisted punches. Not that Hakkai would ever do such a thing. Old habits died hard and miserable, that was all.

What he got, instead of a fist slamming into him with the force of a torpedo, was a slightly smothered mumble. It almost sounded like Hakkai was about to cry. The thought made him open his sunset-red eyes quickly--he'd never known the youkai, no matter how darkly depressed, to give in to tears.

Hakkai was smiling. Not his plasticine grin, or his shield, or his fury... just a beautifully innocent smile. He made another of those odd, smothered noises, and placed one of his hands over his lips, covering his honesty. It occurred to Gojyo that Hakkai was attempting to smother a giggle. Well, thank the gods for that. At least he'd gotten the joke.

After killing a few more chortles, the youkai picked up the mended clothes and automatically began to fold them. The smile was still on his face. "At least now there's little doubt that you could be anything but normal, Gojyo."

Gojyo promised his soul to whatever gods or devils might be in the vicinity--to whichever one might make a cigarette appear in his pocket first. Apparently, the soul of a hanyo wasn't worth a few dried tobacco leaves. "My normal hot-blooded self, yeah."

"Who is no more tactful in his typical state of mind than in any other." Hakkai rose from his bed, the immaculately-folded clothes in his arms, and moved them to the night-stand. Almost absently, he pulled open the small drawer set into its front. Gojyo leaned in to get a look at what was inside. A copy of the Gideon, whatever that was, and of the basic sutra; a notepad and a cheap, stubby pencil; a dusty box of condoms; a dog-eared deck of cards.

Verdant met vermillion.

This hadn't gone at all like Gojyo had intended, something that made him--in the writhing mass of emotions that he referred to as his heart--both furious and hurt. All he'd wanted was to explain everything to Hakkai, get him to understand. He'd gotten good at hiding things from the priest and the monkey, but his best friend? Not a chance in hell. The only thing he'd managed to hide was so obvious that Hakkai simply hadn't seen it, and was still refusing to see it--probably on the grounds that it would save his sanity to not consider it very deeply.

_"I did it because. Well, I like you. A fuck of a lot."_

There was nothing he hated more than leaving that undone--it felt like the cracks that had formed in the foundation of their friendship were only widening with every second that something about it went unsaid. But if Hakkai wanted to ignore it, or deal with it later, he would. Gojyo had laid a lot on him in the last twenty minutes or so. Maybe he was thinking it over. Or maybe he didn't care--whether because Gojyo was his friend, a guy, or whatever. Or, just maybe, Gojyo was over-interpreting things, and acting far too much like a woman for his own tastes, and needed to have the shit smacked out of him. The part of his brain that had cringed from an anticipated blow was now telling him that, more important than resolution, they needed to achieve some sort of peace, and as before, he listened.

"You get the sake and the cigarettes," he said easily, his voice like accented smoke. "Sanzo'd be more likely to give his credit card to the saru than to me at this point. And when you come back, you bastard, you'd better get ready to lose."

-----

Sanzo woke up feeling like someone had stolen his brains in the night, and replaced them with steel wool. He had one bitch of a headache from Goku's ridiculously-loud snoring. Not to mention from when he'd tried to punch his own lights out, to avoid having to hear anymore slobbery, grating breath...

He got untold satisfaction out of putting on his sandals, then using the sharpest edge of the wood to kick Goku's bony butt out of the bed. The monkey actually flew a few feet in the air before landing in a tangled heap on the hardwood floor. The ensuing clattering thump brought a smile to Sanzo's face.

"Aiii, Sanzooooooo!" the broken pile of Goku whined.

"We're going!" he snapped, then purposefully clacked out of the room. The odds were good that Hakkai was awake, and that he'd have woken up the perverted redhead, but Sanzo was going to make damn sure that they were both awake. Not to mention that Hakkai had bought those cartons of Marlboro Reds he'd commanded him to purchase.

He tried the door to their room, and found it unlocked, a fact that surprised him in his heart of hearts. Normally, they had more sense than.

Sanzo stared.

Gojyo and Hakkai were both still sound asleep. On the floor. Surrounded by at least six bottles of what looked like that extremely-pricey sake that Hakkai preferred. And three ashtrays filled with smoked butts. And greasy-looking playing cards. And two piles of yen--one near the ashtrays, and one near most of the bottles. The second pile was significantly larger than the other, and since Sanzo knew for a fact that neither of them had any money to their names, he had a good idea that Hakkai had utilized that new "cash back" option he'd seen popping up on his credit card slips recently.

Hanyo and youkai were both sitting in the middle of this sea of celebratory remains, their backs resting against one of the beds, both off in La-la Land. In his sleep, Gojyo had leaned over, and was resting his head against Hakkai's shoulder. The brunette had tilted his head to reciprocate. They looked like they were nuzzling--

The monk cut off that thought before it could be fully birthed in his mind. He pulled out the paper fan from the same dimensional pocket where Gojyo stored his shakujou, glared at the two sleepers, and smiled. Three smackdowns in as many minutes? The gods normally weren't this generous.

It was going to be a beautiful day for Sanzo. Oh, yes.

_-end-_

AFTERNOTES: I first got the idea for "BaL" about two years ago. I was flipping through a friend's copy of Brian Froud's "Good Fairy/Bad Fairy" book. One of the bad fairies was Lily, a water sprite who would lure men into her lakes, have sex with them, and drown them with her seaweed hair. I'd just started watching Saiyuki, and thought to myself that if there were a youkai equivalent, Gojyo would get snagged by it easily.

Obviously, that's not what happened here. ; Idea led to idea, and before I knew it, I had a huge tangled mass of concepts. One or two holes still remained, though, so I decided--rather than fuck the entire thing up and hate myself for it--that I wouldn't write a word on it until I figured everything out.

Everything's since been figured out, and thus, this is here.

The sequel arc is titled "Running Hot and Cold", but you should read "Split Horizons" first. Thank you for reading, and especially for reviewing. .


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